Notes Towards The Definition Of Culture

Notes towards
the Definition of Culture

books by T. S. Eliot

*

COLLECTED POEMS 1909-1955
FOUR QUARTETS
MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS
THE FAMILY REUNION
SELECTED ESSAYS
ESSAYS ANCIENT AND MODERN
THE USE OF POETRY AND THE USE OF CRITICISM
THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
THOUGHTS AFTER LAMBETH
WHAT IS A CLASSIC?

POINTS OF VIEW

*

OLD POSSUM’S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS

Notes towards
the Definition of Culture

by

T. S. ELIOT

Definition : i. The setting of bounds ;
limitation (rare) - 1483

— Oxford English Dictionary

FABER AND FABER LIMITED
24 Russell Square
London

First published in mcmxlviii
by Faber and Faber Limited
24 Russell Square London W.C. 1
Printed in Great Britain by
R. MacLphose and Company Limited
The University Press Glasgow
All rights reserved

PHILIP MAIRET

gratitude and admiration

Preface

This essay was begun four or five years ago. A pre-
liminary sketch, under the same title, was published
in three successive numbers of The New English
Weekly. From this sketch took shape a paper called ‘Cultural
Forces in the Human Order’, which appeared in the volume
Prospect for Christendom^ edited by Mr. Maurice B.
Reckitt (Faber; 1945): a revision of this paper forms the
first chapter of the present book. The second chapter is a
revision of a paper published in The New English Review in
October, 1945.

I have added as an appendix the English text of three
broadcast talks to Germany which have appeared under
the title of ‘Die Einheit der Europaeischen Kultur’ (Carl
Habel Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin; 1946).

Throughout this study, I recognise a particular debt to the
writings of Canon V. A. Demant, Mr. Christopher Dawson,
and the late Professor Karl Mannheim. It is the more
necessary to acknowledge this debt in general, since I have
not in my text referred to the first two of these writers, and
since my debt to the third is much greater than appears
from the one context in which I discuss his theory.

I have also profited by reading an article by Mr. Dwight
Macdonald in Politics (New York) for February 1944,
entitled ‘A Theory of “Popular Culture” and an anony-
mous critique of this article in the issue of the same
periodical for November 1946. Mr. Macdonald’s theory
strikes me as the best alternative to my own that I have seer

T. S. E

January, 1948.

9

Contents

INTRODUCTION page 15

I. THE THREE SENSES OF ‘CULTURE’ 21

II. THE CLASS AND THE ELITE 35

III. UNITY AND DIVERSITY; THE REGION 50

IV. UNITY AND DIVERSITY: SECT AND CULT 67

V. A NOTE ON CULTURE AND POLITICS 83

VI. NOTES ON EDUCATION AND CULTURE: AND

CONCLUSION 95

APPENDIX — THE UNITY OF EUROPEAN CULTURE 110

11

Introduction

I think our studies ought to be all but purposeless. They want to be
pursued with chastity like mathematics. — ^acton.

My purpose in writing the following chapters is not,
as might appear from a casual inspection of the
table of contents, to outline a social or political
philosophy; nor is the book intended to be merely a vehicle
for my observations on a variety of topics. My aim is to help
to define a word, the word culture.

Just as a doctrine only needs to be defined after the
appearance of some heresy, so a word does not need to
receive this attention until it has come to be misused. I have
observed with growing anxiety the career of this word cul-
ture during the past six or seven years. We may find it
natural, and significant, that during a period of unparalleled
destructiveness, this word should come to have an important
role in the journalistic vocabulary. Its part is of course
doubled by the word civilisation. I have made no attempt in
this essay to determine the frontier between the meanings
of these two words: for I came to the conclusion that any
such attempt could only produce an artificial distinction,
peculiar to the book, which the reader would have difficulty
in retaining; and which, after closing the book, he would
abandon with a sense of relief. We do use one word,
frequently enough, in a context where the other would
do as well; there are other contexts where one word obvi-
ously fits and the other does not; and I do not think that
this need cause embarrassment. There are enough inevitable
obstacles, in this discussion, without erecting unnecessary
ones.

13

Introduction

In August, 1945, there was published the text of a draft
constitution for a ‘United Nations Educational Scientific and
Cultural Organisation’. The purpose of this organisation
was, in Article I, defined as follows:

1 . To develop and maintain mutual understanding amd appreciation
of the life and culture, the arts, the humanities, and the sciences of the
peoples of the world, as a basis for effective international organisation
and world peace.

2. To co-operate in extending and in making available to all peoples
for the service of common human needs the world’s full body of know-
ledge and culture, and in assuring its contribution to the economic
stability, political security, and general well-being of the peoples of the
world.

I am not at the moment concerned to extract a meaning
from these sentences: I only quote them to call attention to
the word culture^ and to suggest that before acting on such
resolutions we should try to find out what this one word
means. This is only one of innumerable instances which
might be cited, of the use of a word which nobody bothers
to examine. In general, the word is used in two ways: by a
kind of synechdoche, when the speaker has in mind one of
the elements or evidences of culture — such as ‘art’j or, as in
the passage just quoted, as a kind of emotional stimulant —
or anaesthetic.^

At the beginning of my first chapter I have endeavoured

^ The use of the word culture, by those who have not, as it seems to
me, pondered deeply on the meaning of the word before employing it,
might be illustrated by countless examples. Another instance may
suffice. I quote from the Times Educational Supplement of November 3,
1945 (p. 522):

“Why should we bring into our scheme for international collaboration
machinery concerning education and culture?” Such was the question
’ asked by the Prime Minister when, in addressing the delegates of nearly
40 nations attending the United Nations Conference to establish an
Educational and Cultural Organisation in London on Thursday after-
noon, he extended to them the greetings of His Majesty’s Govern-
ment. . . . Mr. Attlee concluded with a plea that if we were to know
our neighbours we must understand their culture, through their books,
newspapers, radio and films.

The Minister of Education committed herself to the following:

‘Now we are met together: workers in education, in scientific research,
and in the varied fields of culture. We represent those who teach, those

14 ■

Introduction

to distinguish and relate the three principal uses of the word:
and to make the point, that when we use the term in one of
these three ways we should do so in awareness of the others.
I then try to expose the essential relation of culture to reli-
gion, and to make clear the limitations of the word relation
as an expression of this ‘relation’. The first important
assertion is that no culture has appeared or developed
except together with a religion: according to the point
of view of the observer, the culture will appear to be the
product of the religion, or the religion the product of the
culture.

In the next three chapters I discuss what seem to me to be
three important conditions for culture. The first of these is
organic (not merely planned, but growing) structure, such
as will foster the hereditary transmission of culture within
a culture: and this requires the persistence of social
classes. The second is the necessity that a culture should
be analysable, geographically, into local cultures: this
raises the problem of ‘regionalism’. The third is the
balance of unity and diversity in religion — ^that is, univer-
sality of doctrine with particularity of cult and devotion.
The reader must keep in mind that I am not pretending
to account for all the necessary conditions for a flourishing
culture 5 I discuss three which have especially struck my

who discover, those who write, those who express their inspiration in
music or in art. . . . Lastly we have culture. Some may argue that the
artist, the musician, the writer, all the creative workers in the humanities
and the arts, cannot be organised either nationally or internationally.
The artist, it has been said, works to please himself. That might
have been a tenable argument before the war. But those of us who
remember the struggle in the Far East and in Europe in the days
preceding the open war know how much the fight against Fascism
depended upon the determination of writers and artists to keep their
international contacts that they might reach across the rapidly rising
frontier barriers.’

It is only fair to add, that when it comes to talking nonsense about
culture, there is nothing to choose between politicians of one stripe or
another. Had the election of 1945 brought the alternative party into
power, we should have heard much the same pronouncements in the
same circumstances. The pursuit of politics is incompatible with a strict
attention to exact meanings on all occasions. The reader should there-
fore abstain from deriding either Mr, Attlee or the late regretted Miss
Wilkinson.

15

Introduction

attention.^ He must also remember that what I offer is not
a set of directions for fabricating a culture. I do not say
that by setting about to produce these, and any other ad-
ditional conditions, we can confidently expect to improve
our civilisation. I say only that, so far as my observation
goes, you are unlikely to have a high civilisation where

these conditions are absent..

The remaining two chapters of the book make some dight
attempt to disentangle culture from politics and education.

I dare say that some readers will draw political inferences
from this discussion: what is more likely is that particular
minds will read into my text a confirmation or repudiation
of their own political convictions and prejudices. The writer
himself is not without political convictions and prejudices 5
but the imposition of them is no part of his present inten-
tion. What I try to say is this: here are what I believe to be
essential conditions for the grovvl:h and for the survival of
culture. If they conflict with any passionate faith of the
reader — if, for instance, he finds it shocking that culture
and equalitarianism should conflict, if it seems monstrous to
hirn that anyone should have ‘advantages of birth’ — I do
not ask him to change his faith, I merely ask him to stop
paying lip-service to culture. If the reader says: ‘the state of
affairs which I wish to bring about is right (or is just^^ or is

^ In an illuminating supplement to the Christian News-Letter of
July 24, 1946, Miss Marjorie Reeves has a very suggestive paragraph
on ‘The Culture of an Industry’. If she somewhat enlarged her mean-
ing, what she says would fit in with my own way of using the word
‘culture’. She says, of the culture of an industry, which she believes
quite rightly should be presented to the young worker: ‘it includes the
geography of its raw materials and final markets, its historical evolution,
inventions and scientific background, its economics and so forth.’ It
includes all this, certainly; but an industry, if it is to engage the interest
of more than the conscious mind of the worker, should also have a way
of life somewhat peculiar to its initiates, with its own forms of festivity
and observances. I mention this interesting reminder of the culture of
industry, however, as evidence that I am aware of other nuclei of culture
than those discussed in this book.

® I must introduce a parenthetical protest against the abuse of the
current term ‘social justice’. From meaning ‘justice in relations between
groups or classes’ it may slip into meaning a particular assumption as to
what these relations should be; and a course of action might be sup-
ported because it represented the aim of ‘social justice’, which from the

16

Introduction

inevitable)-^ and if this must lead to a fmther deterioration of
culture, we must accept that deterioration’ — ^then I can have
no quarrel with him. I might even, in some circumstances,
feel obliged to support him. The effect of such a wave of
honesty would be that the word culture would cease to be
abused, cease to appear in contexts where it does not belong;
and to rescue this word is the extreme of my ambition.

As things are, it is normal for anybody who advocates any
social change, or any alteration of our political system, or
any expansion of public education, or any development of
social service, to claim confidently that it will lead to the
improvement and increase of culture. Sometimes culture,
or civilisation, is set in the forefront, and we are told that
what we need, must have, and shall get, is a ‘new civilisa-
tion’. In 1944 I read a symposium in The Sunday Times
(November 5 1 ) in which Professor Harold Laski, or his head-
line writer, affirmed that we were fighting the late war for
a ‘new civilisation’. Mr. Laski at least asserted this;

If it is agreed that these who seek to rebuild what Mr. Churchill likes
to call ‘traditional’ Britain have no hope of fulfilling that end, it
follows that there must be a new Britain in a new civilisation.

We might murmur ‘it is not agreed’, but that woiJd be to
miss my point. Mr. Laski is right to this extent, that ifyve
lose anything finally and irreparably, we must make do
without it; but I think he meant to say something more than
that.

Mr. Laski is, or was convinced that the particular political
and social changes which he desires to bring about, and
which he believes to be advantageous for society, will,
because they are so radical, result in a new civilisation.
That is quite conceivable; what we are not justified in
concluding, with regard to his or any other changes in the
social framework which anybody advocates, is that the ‘new

point of view of ‘justice’ was not just. The term ‘social justice’ is in danger
of losing its rational content — ^which would he replaced by a powerful
emotional charge. I believe that I have used the term myself: it should
never be employed unless the user is prepared^ to define clearly what
social justice means to him, and why he thinks it just.

B 17

E.D.C.

Introduction

civilisation’ is itself desirable. For one thing, we can have no
notion of what the new civilisation will be like: so many
other causes operate than those we may have in mind, and
the results of these and the others, operating together, are
so incalculable, that we cannot imagine what it would feel
like to live in that new civilisation. For another thing, the
people who live in that new civilisation wiU, by the fact of
belonging to it, be different from ourselves, and they will
be just as different from Mr. Laski. Every change we rhake
is tending to bring about a new civilisation of the nature of
which we are ignorant, and in which we should all of us be
unhappy. A new civilisation is, in fact, coming into being all
the time: the civilisation of the present day would seem very
new indeed to any civilised man of the eighteenth century,
and I cannot imagine the most ardent or radical reformer
of that age taking much pleasure in the civilisation that
would meet his eye now. All that a concern for civilisation
can direct us to do, is to improve such civilisation as we have,
for we can imagine no other. On the other hand, there have
always been people who have believed in particular changes
as good in themselves, without worrying about the futme
of civilisation, and without finding it necessary to recom-
mend their innovations by the specious glitter of unmeaning
promises.

A new civilisation is always being made: the state of
affairs that we enjoy today illustrates what happens to the
aspirations of each age for a better one. The most important
question that we can ask, is whether there is any permanent
standard, by which we can compare one civilisation with
another, and by which we can make some guess at the im-
provement or decline of our own. We have to admit, in
comparing one civilisation with another, and in comparing
the different stages of our own, that no one society and no
one age of it realises all the values of civilisation. Not all of
these values may be compatible with each other: what is at
least as certain is that in realising some we lose the apprecia-
tion of others. Nevertheless, we can distinguish between
higher and lower cultures} we can distinguish between ad-

18

Introduction

vance and retrogression. We can assert with some confidence
that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of
culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that
the evidences of this decline are visible in every department
of human activity.^ I see no reason why the decay of culture
should not proceed much further, and why we may not even
anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it is possible
to say that it will have no culture. Then culture will have
to grow again from the soil; and when I say it must grow
again from the soil, I do not mean that it will be brought
into existence by any activity of political demagogues. The
question asked by this essay, is whether there are any per-
manent conditions, in the absence of which no higher cul-
ture can be expected.

If we succeed even partially in answering this question,,
we must then put ourselves on guard against the delusion of
trying to bring about these conditions the sake o/ the
improvement of our culture. For if any definite conclusions
emerge from this study, one of them is sirrely this, that
culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at.
It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious
activities, each pursued for its own sake: the artist must
concentrate upon his canvas, the poet upon his typewriter,
the civil servant upon the just settlement of particular prob-
lems as they present themselves upon his desk, each accord-
ing to the situation in which he finds himself. Even if these
conditions with which I am concerned, seem to the reader
to represent desirable social aims, he must not leap to the
conclusion that these aims can be fulfilled solely by deli-
berate organisation. A class division of society planned by an
absolute authority would be artificial and intolerable; a de-
centralisation under central direction would be a contradic-
tion; an ecclesiastical unity cannot be imposed in the hope
that it will bring about unity of faith, and a religious diver-
sity cultivated for its own sake would be absurd. The point

1 For confirmation from a point of view very different from that from
which this essay is written, see Our Threatened V alues by Victor
Gollancz (1946).

19

Introduction

at which we can arrive, is the recognition that these condi-
tions of culture are ‘natural’ to human beings^ that although
we can do little to encourage them, we can combat the
intellectual errors and the emotional prejudices which stand
in their way. For the rest, we should look for the improve-
ment of society, as we seek our own individual improvement,
in relatively minute particulars. We cannot say: ‘I shall make
myself into a different person’ ; we can only say: ‘I will give
up this bad habit, and endeavour to contract this good one.’
So of society we can only say: ‘We shall try to improve it in
this respect or the other, where excess or defect is evident;
we must try at the same time to embrace so much in our
view, that we may avoid, in putting one thing right, putting
something else wrong.’ Even this is to express an aspiration
greater than we can achieve: for it is as much, or more, be-
cause of what we do piecemeal without understanding or
foreseeing the consequences, that the culture of one age
differs from that of its predecessor.

20

CHAPTER I

The Three Senses of ‘Culture’

The term culture has different associations according
to whether we have in mind the development of an
individual, of a group or class, or of a whole society.
It is a part of my thesis that the culture of the individual is
dependent upon the culture of a group or class, and that the
culture of tlie group or class is dependent upon the culture
of the whole society to which that group or class belongs.
Therefore it is the culture of the society that is fundamental,
and it is the meaning of the term ‘culture’ in relation to the
whole society that should be examined first. When the term
‘culture’ is applied to the manipulation of lower organisms
— ^to tlie work of the bacteriologist or the c^rfculturalist —
the meaning is clear enough, for we can have unanimity in
respect of the ends to be attained, and we can agree when
we have or have not attained them. When it is applied to
the improvement of the human mind and spirit, we are less
likely to agree as to what culture is. The term itself, as
signifying something to be consciously aimed at in human
affairs, has not a long history. As something to be achieved
by deliberate effort, ‘culture’ is relatively intelligible when
we are concerned with the self-cultivation of the individual,
whose culture is seen against the background of the culture
of the group and of the society. The culture of the group
also, has a definite meaning in contrast to the less developed
culture of the mass of society. The difference between the
three applications of the term can be best apprehended by
asking how far, in relation to the individual, the group, and
society as a whole the conscious aim to achieve culture has

21

The Three Senses of ''Culture'

any meaning. A good deal of confusion could be avoided, if
■we refrained from setting before the group, what can be the
aim only of the individual; and before society as a whole,
what can be the aim only of a group.

The general, or anthropological sense of the word culture,
as used for instance by E. B. Tylor in the title of his book
Primitive Culture, has flourished independently of the other
senses: but if we are considering highly developed societies,
and especially our own contemporary society, we have to
consider the relationship of the three senses. At this point
anthropology passes over into sociology. Amongst men of
letters and moralists, it has been usual to discuss cultixre in
the first two senses, and especially the first, without relation
to the third. The most easily remembered example of this
selection is Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Arnold
is concerned primarily -with the individual and the ‘perfec-
tion’ at which he should aim. It is true that in his famous
classification of ‘Barbarians, Philistines, Populace’ he con-
cerns himself with a critique of classes; but his criticism is
confined to an indictment of these classes for their short-
comings, and does not proceed to consider what shoxild he
the proper function or ‘perfection’ of each class. The effect,
therefore, is to exhort the individual who would attain the
peculiar kind of ‘perfection’ which Arnold calls ‘culture’, to
rise superior to the limitations of any class, rather than to
realise its highest attainable ideals.

The impression of thinness which Arnold’s ‘cultmre’ con-
veys to a modern reader is partly due to the absence of social
background to his picture. But it is also due, I think, to his
failure to take account of another way in which we use the
word ‘culture’, besides the three already mentioned. There
are several kinds of attainment which we may have in mind
in different contexts. We may be thinking of refinement of
manners — or urbanity and civility, if so, we shall think first
of a social class, and of the superior individual as representa-
tive of the best of that class. We may be thinking of learning
and a close acquaintance with the accumulated wisdom of
the past: if so, our man of culture is the scholar. We may be

22

The Three Senses of ‘Culture^

thinking of philosophy in the widest sense — an interest in,
and some ability to manipulate, abstract ideas: if so, we may
mean the intellectual (recognising the fact that this term is
now used very loosely, to comprehend many persons not
conspicuous for strength of intellect). Or we may be think-
ing of the arts-, if so, we mean the artist and the amateur or
dilletante. But what we seldom have in mind is all of these
things at the same time. We do not find, for instance, that
an., understanding of music or painting figures explicitly in
Arnold’s description of the cultured man: yet no one will
deny that these attainments play a part in culture.

If we look at the several activities of culture listed in the
preceding ^paragraph, we must conclude that no perfection
in any one of them, to the exclusion of the others, can confer
culture on anybody. We know that good manners, without
education, intellect or sensibility to the arts, tends towards
mere automatism; that learning without good manners or
sensibility is pedantry; that intellectual ability without the
more human attributes is admirable only in the same way
as- the brilliance of a child chess prodigy; and that the arts
without intellectual context are vanity. And if we do not
find culture in any one of these perfections alone, so we
must not expect any one person to be accomplished in all of
them; we shall come to infer that the wholly cultured indivi-
dual is a phantasm; and we shall look for culture, not in any
individual or in any one group of individuals, but more and
more widely; and we are driven in the end to find it in the
pattern of the society as a whole. This seems to me a very
obvious reflection: but it is frequently overlooked. People
are always ready to consider themselves persons of culture,
on the strength of one proficiency, when they are not only
lacking in others, but blind to those they lack. An artist of
any kind, even a very great artist, is not for this reason alone
a man of culture: artists are not only often insensitive to
other arts than those which they practise, but sometimes
have very bad maxmers or meagre intellectual gifts. The
person who contributes to crdture, however important his
contribution may be, is not always a ‘cultured person’ .

25

The Three Senses of ^Culture'

It does not foUow from this that there is no meaning in
speaking of the cultiire of an individual, or of a group or
class. We only mean that the culture of the individual can-
not he isolated from that of the group, and that the culture
of the group cannot he abstracted from that of the whole
society 5 and , that our notion of ‘perfection’ must take all
three senses of ‘culture’ into account at once. Nor does it
follow that in a society, of whatever grade of culture, the
groups concerned with each activity of culture will be dis-
tinct and exclusive: on the contrary, it is only by an overlap-
ping and sharing of interests, by participation and mutual
appreciation, that the cohesion necessary for culture can
obtain. A religion requires not only a body of priests who
know what they are doing, but a body of worshippers who
know what is being done.

It is obvious that among the more primitive communities
the several activities of culture are inextricably interwoven.
The Dyak who spends the better part of a season in shaping,
carving and painting his barque of the peculiar design re-
quired for the annual ritual of head-hunting, is exercising
several cultural activities at once — of art and religion, as
well as of amphibious warfare. As civilisation becomes more
complex, greater occupational specialisation evinces itself:
in the ‘stone age’ New Hebrides, Mr. John Layard says,
certain islands specialise in particular arts and crafts, ex-
changing their wares and displaying their accomplishments
to the reciprocal satisfaction of the members of the archi-
pelago. But while the individuals of a tribe, or of a group of
islands or villages ^ have separate functions — of which

the most peculiar are those of the king and the witch-doctor
— it is only at a much further stage that religion, science,
politics and art become abstractly conceived apart from each
other. And just as the functions of individuals become heredi-
tary, and hereditary function hardens into class or caste
distinction, and class distinction leads to conflict, so do reli-
gion, politics, science and art reach a point at which there is
conscious struggle between them for autonomy or domi-
nance. This friction is, at some stages and in some situations,

24

The Three Senses of ^Culture'

highly creative: how far it is the result, and how far the
cause, of increased consciousness need not here be considered.
The tension within the society may become also a tension
within the mind of the more conscious individual: the clash
of duties in Antigone, which is not simply a clash between
piety and civil obedience, or between religion and politics,
but between conflicting laws within what is still a religious-
political complex, represents a very advanced stage of civili-
sation: for the conflict must have meaning in the audience’s
experience before it can be made articulate by the drama-
tist and receive from the audience the response which the
dramatist’s art requires.

As a society develops towards functional complexity and
differentiation, we may expect the emergence of several
cultural levels: in short, the culture of the class or group will
present itself. It will not, I think, be disputed that in any
future society, as in every civilised society of the past, there
must be these different levels. I do not think that the most
ardent champions of social equality dispute this: the differ-
ence of opinion turns on whether the transmission of group
culture must be by inheritance — ^whether each cultural level
must propagate itself — or whether it can be hoped that
some mechanism of selection will be found, so that every
individual shall in due course take his place at the highest
cultural level for which his natural aptitudes qualify him.
What is pertinent at this point is that the emergence of
more highly cultured groups does not leave the rest of society
unaffected: it is itself part of a process in which the whole
society changes. And it is certain — and especially obvious
when we turn our attention to the arts — ^that as new values
appear, and as thought, sensibility and expression become
more elaborate, some earlier values vanish. That is only to
say that you cannot expect to have all stages of development
at once; that a civilisation cannot simultaneously produce
great folk poetry at one cultural level and Paradise Lost at
another. Indeed, the one thing that time is ever sure to
bring about is the loss: gain or compensation is almost always
conceivable but never certain.

25

The Three Senses of Culture'

While it appears that progress in civilisation will bring
into being more specialised culture groups, we must not
expect this development to be unattended by perils. Cultural
disintegration may ensue upon cultural specialisation: and
it is the most radical disintegration that a society can suffer.
It is not the only kind, or it is not the only aspect under
which disintegration can be studied; but, whatever be cause
or effect, the disintegration of culture is the most serious
and the most difficult to repair. (Here, of course, we are
emphasising the culture of the whole society.) It must not
be confused with another malady, ossification into caste, as
in Hindu India, of what may have been originally only a hier-
archy of functions: even though it is possible that both
maladies have some hold upon British society to-day. Cultu-
ral disintegration is present when two or more strata so
separate that these become in effect distinct cultures; and
also when culture at the upper group level breaks into frag-
ments each of which represents one cultural activity alone.
If I am not mistaken, some disintegration of the classes in
which culture is, or should be, most highly developed, has
already taken place in western society — as well as some cul-
tural separation between one level of society and another.
Religious thought and practice, philosophy and art, all tend
to become isolated areas cultivated by groups in no commu-
nication with each other. The artistic sensibility is im-
poverished by its divorce from the religious sensibility, the
religious by its separation from the artistic; and the vestige
of manners may be left to a few survivors of a vanishing
class who, their sensibility untrained by either religion or
art and their minds unfurnished with the material for witty
conversation, will have no context in their lives to give
value to their behaviour. And deterioration on the higher
levels is a matter of concern, not only to the group which is
visibly affected, but to the whole people.

The causes of a total decline of culture are as complex as
the evidence of it is various. Some may be found in the
accounts given, by various specialists, of the causes of more
readily apprehended social ailments for which we must

The Three Senses of ^Culture*

continue to seek specific remedies. Yet we become more and
more aware of the extent to which the baffling problem of
‘culture’ underlies the problems of the relation of every part
of the world to every other. When we concern ourselves
with the relation of the great nations to each others the rela-
tion of the great to the small nations^ ^ the relation of inter-
mixed ‘communities’, as in India, to each other^ the relation
of parent nations to those which have originated as colonies;
the relation of the colonist to the native; the relation be-
tween peoples of such areas as the West Indies, where com-
pulsion or economic inducement has brought together large
numbers of different races: behind all these perplexing ques-
tions, involving decisions to be made by many men every
day, there is the question of what culture is, and the ques-
tion whether it is anything that we can control or deliber-
ately influence. These questions confront us whenever we
devise a theory, or frame a policy, of education. If we take
culture seriously, we see that a people does not need merely
enough to eat (though even that is more than we seem able
to ensure) but a proper and particular cuisine: one symptom
of the decline of culture in Britain is indifference to the art
of preparing food. Culture may even be described simply as
that which makes life worth living. And it is what justifies
other peoples and other generations in saying, when they
contemplate the remains and the influence of an extinct
civilisation, that it was worth while for that civilisation to
have existed.

I have already asserted, in my introduction, that no cul-
ture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion.
But the use of the term relation here may easily lead us into

1 This point is touched upon, though without any discussion of the
meaning of ‘culture’, by E. H. Carr: Conditions of Peace, Part I, ch. iii.
He says: ‘in a clumsy but convenient terminology which originated in
Central Europe, we must distinguish between “cultural nation’’ and
“state nation”. The existence of a more or less homogeneous racial or
linguistic group bound together by a common tradition and the cultiva-
tion of a common culture must cease to provide a prima facie case for
the setting up or the maintenance of an independent political unit.’
But Mr. Carr is here concerned wdth the problem of political unity,
rather than with that of the preservation of cultures, or the question
whether they are worth preserving, in the political unit .

27 ■.

The Three Senses of ^ Culture^

error. The facile assumption of a relationship between cul-
ture and religion is perhaps the most fundamental weakness
of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Arnold gives the impres-
sion that Culture (as he uses the term) is something more
comprehensive than religion^ that the latter is no more than
a necessary element, supplying ethical formation and some
emotional colour, to Culture which is the ultimate value.

It may have struck the reader that what I have said about
the development of culture, and about the dangers of dis-
integration when a culture has reached a highly developed
stage, may apply also in the history of religion. The develop-
ment of culture and the development of religion, in a society
uninfluenced from without, cannot be clearly isolated from
each other: and it will depend upon the bias of the particular
observer, whether a refinement of culture is held to be the
cause of progress in religion, or whether a progress in reli-
gion is held to be the cause of a refinement of the culture.
What perhaps influences us towards treating religion and
culture as two different things is the history of the penetra-
tion of Graeco-Roman culture by the Christian Faith — a
penetration which had profound effects both upon that cul-
ture and upon the course of development taken by Christian
thought and practice. But the culture with which primitive
Christianity came into contact (as well as that of the environ-
ment in which Christianity took its origins) was itself a reli-
gious culture in decline. So, while we believe that the same
religion may inform a variety of cultures, we may ask
whether any culture could come into being, or maintain it-
self, without a religious basis. We may go further and ask
whether what we call the culture, and what we call the
religion, of a people are not different aspects of the same
thing: the culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to
speak) of the religion of a people. To put the matter in this
way may throw light on my reservations concerning the
word

As a society develops, a greater number of degrees and
kinds of religious capacity and function — as well as of other
capacities and functions — ^will make their appearance. It is

28

The Three Senses of ‘Culture'

to be noticed that in some religions the differentiation has
been so wide that there have resulted in effect two religions
— one for the populace and one for the adepts. The evils of
‘two nations’ in religion are obvious. Christianity has resisted
this malady better than Hinduism. The schisms of the six-
teenth century, and the subsequent multiplication of sects,
can be studied either as the history of division of religious
thought, or as a struggle between opposing social groups —
as the variation of doctrine, or as the disintegration of Euro-
pean culture. Yet, while these wide divergences of belief on
the same level are lamentable, the Faith can, and must, find
room for many degrees of intellectual, imaginative and
emotional receptivity to the same doctrines, just as it can
embrace many variations of order and ritual. The Christian
Faith also, psychologically considered — as systems of beliefs
and attitudes in particular embodied minds — ^will have a
history: though it would be a gross error to suppose that the
sense in which it can be spoken of as developing and
changing, implies the possibility of greater sanctity or divine
illumination becoming available to human beings through
collective progress. (We do not assume that there is, over a
long period, progress even in art, or that ‘primitive’ art is,
as art, necessarily inferior to the more sophisticated.) But
one of the features of development, whether we are taking
the religious or the cultural point of view, is the appearance
of scepticism — ^by which, of course, I do not mean infidelity
or destructiveness (still less the unbelief which is due to
mental sloth) but the habit of examining evidence and the
capacity for delayed decision. Scepticism is a highly civilised
trait, though, when it declines into pyrrhonism, it is one of
which civilisation can die. Where scepticism is strength,
Pyrrhonism is weakness: for we need not only the strength
to defer a decision, but the strength to make one.

The conception of culture and religion as being, when
each term is taken in the right context, different aspects of
the same thing, is one which requires a good deal of explana-
tion. But I should like to suggest first, that it provides us
with the means of combating two complementary errors.

29

The Three Senses of ‘ Culture‘s

The one more widely held is that culture can be preserved,
extended and developed in the absence of religion. This
error may be held by the Christian in common with the
infidel, and its proper refutation would require an historical
analysis of considerable refinement, because the truth is not
immediately apparent, and may seem even to be contra-
dicted by appearances: a culture may linger on, and indeed
produce some of its most brilliant artistic and other successes
after the religious faith has fallen into decay. The other
error is the belief that the preservation and maintenance of
religion need not reckon with the preservation and main-
tenance of culture: a belief which may even lead to the
rejection of the products of culture as frivolous obstruc-
tions to the spiritual life. To be in a position to reject this
error, as with the other, requires us to take a distant viewj
to refuse to accept the conclusion, when the culture that we
see is a culture in decline, that culture is something to which
we can afford to remain indifferent. And I must add that to
see the unity of culture and religion in this way neither
implies that all the products of art can be accepted uncriti-
cally, nor provides a criterion by which everybody can im-
mediately distinguish between them. Aesthetic sensibility
must be extended into spiritual perception, and spiritual
perception must be extended into aesthetic sensibility and
disciplined taste before we are qualified to pass judgment
upon decadence or diabolism or nihilism in art. To judge a
work of art by artistic or by religious standards, to judge
a religion by religious or artistic standards should come in
the end to the same thing: though it is an end at which no
individual can arrive.

The way of looking at culture and religion which I have
been trying to adumbrate is so difficult that I am not sure
I grasp it myself except in flashes, or that I comprehend all
its implications. It is also one which involves the risk of
error at every moment, by some unperceived alteration of
the meaning which either term has when the two are
coupled in this way, into some meaning which either may
have when taken alone. It holds good only in the sense in

The Three Senses of 'Culture'

which people are unconscious of both their culture and their
religion. Anyone with even the slightest religious conscious-
ness must be afflicted from time to time by the contrast be-
tween his religious faith and his behaviour j anyone with the
taste that individual or group culture confers must be aware
of values which he cannot call religious. And both ‘religion’
and ‘culture’, besides meaning different things from each
other, should mean for the individual and for the group
something towards which they strive, not merely something
which they possess. Yet there is an aspect in which we can
see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth
to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and
that way of life is also its culture. And at the same time we
must recognise that when this identification is complete, it
means in actual societies both an inferior culture and an
inferior religion. A universal religion is at least potentially
higher than one which any race or nation claims exclusively
for itself; and a culture realising a religion also realised in
other cultures is at least potentially a higher culture than
one which has a religion exclusively to itself. From one
point of view we may identify: from another, we must
separate.

Taking now the point of view of identification, the reader
must remind himself as the author has constantly to do, of
how much is here embraced by the term culture. It includes
all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby
Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup
final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale
cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar,
nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.
The reader can make his own list. And then we have to face
the strange idea that what is part of our culture is also a part
of our lived religion .

We must not think of our culture as completely unified—
my list above was designed to avoid that suggestion. And
the actual religion of no European people has ever been
purely Christian, or purely anthing else. There are always
bits and traces of more primitive faiths, more or less

31

The Three Senses of ^Culture'

absorbed; there is always the tendency towards parasitic
beliefs; there are always perversions, as when patriotism,
which pertains to natural religion and is therefore licit and
even encomaged by the Church, becomes exaggerated into
a caricature of itself. And it is only too easy for a people to
maintain contradictory beliefs and to propitiate mutually
antagonistic powers.

The reflection that what we believe is not merely what
we formulate and subscribe to, but that behaviour is also
belief, and that even the most conscious and developed of us
live also at the level on which belief and behaviour cannot
be distinguished, is one that may, once we allow our imagi-
nation to play upon it, be very disconcerting. It gives an
importance to our most trivial pursuits, to the occupation of
our every minute, which we cannot contemplate long with-
out the horror of nightmare. When we consider the quality
of the integration required for the full cultivation of the
spiritual life, we must keep in mind the possibility of grace
and the exemplars of sanctity in order not to sink into
despair. And when we consider the problem of evangelisa-
tion, of the development of a Christian society, we have
reason to quail. To believe that lue are religious people and
that other people are without religion is a simplification
which approaches distortion. To reflect that from one point
of view religion is culture, and from another point of view
culture is religion, can be very disturbing. To ask whether
the people have not a religion already, in which Derby Day
and the dog track play their parts, is embarrassing; so is the
suggestion that part of the religion of the higher ecclesiastic
is gaiters and the Athenaeum. It is inconvenient for Chris-
tians to find that as Christians they do not believe enough,
and that on the other hand they, with everybody else,
believe in too many things: yet this is a consequence of
reflecting, that bishops are a part of English culture, and
horses and dogs are a part of English religion.

It is commonly assumed that there is culture,, but that it
is the property of a small section of society; and from this
assumption it is usual to proceed to one of two conclusions:

52

The Three Senses of ^ Culture'

either that culture can only be the concern of a small
minority, and that therefore there is no place for it in the
society of the future 5 or that in the society of the future the
culture which has been the possession of the few must be
put at the disposal of everybody. This assumption and its
consequences remind us of the Puritan antipathy to monasti-
cism and the ascetic life: for just as a culture which is only
accessible to the few is now deprecated, so was the enclosed
and contemplative life condemned by extreme Protestan-
tism, and celibacy regarded with almost as much abhorrence
as perversion.

In order to apprehend the theory of religion and culture
which I have endeavoured to set forth in this chapter, we
have to try to avoid the two alternative errors: that of regard-
ing religion and culture as two separate things between
which there is a relation, and that of identifying religion and
culture. I spoke at one point of the culture of a people as an
incarnation of its religion; and while I am aware of the
temerity of employing such an exalted term, I cannot think
of any other which would convey so well the intention to
avoid relation on the one hand and identification on the
other. The truth, partial truth, or falsity of a religion neither
consists in the cultural achievements of the peoples professing
that religion, nor submits to being exactly tested by them.
For what a people may be said to believe, as shown by its
behaviour, is, as I have said, always a great deal more and a
great deal less than its professed faith in its purity. Fmther-
more, a people whose culture has been formed together
with a religion of partial truth, may live that religion (at
some period in its history, at least) with greater fidelity than
another people which has a truer light. It is only when we
imagine our culture as it ought to be, if our society were a
really Christian society, that we can dare to speak of Chris-
tian culture as the highest culture; it is only by referring to
all the phases of this culture, which has been the culture of
Europe, that we can affirm that it is the highest culture that
the world has ever known. In comparing our culture as it is
to-day, with that of non-Christian peoples, we must be pre-

C 55 E-D-C.

The Three Senses of ^Culture'

pared to find that ours is in one respect or another inferior.

I do not overlook the possibility that Britain, if it consum-
mated its apostasy by reforming itself according to the pre-
scriptions of some inferior or materialistic religion, might
blossom into a culture more brilliant than that we can show
to-day. That would not be evidence that the new religion
was true, and that Christianity was false. It would merely
prove that any religion, while it lasts, and on its own level,
gives an apparent meaning to life, provides the frame-work
for a culture, and protects the mass of humanity from bore-
dom and despair.

CHAPTER II

The Class and the Elite

It woxild appear, according to the account of levels of
culture put forward in the previous chapter, that among
the more primitive societies, the higher types exhibit
more marked differentiations of function amongst their
members than the lower typesd At a higher stage still, we
find that some functions are more honoured than others,
and this division promotes the development of classes, in
which higher honour and higher privilege are accorded, not
merely to the person as functionary but as member of the
class. And the class itself possesses a function, that of main-
taining that part of the total culture of the society which
pertains to that class. We have to try to keep in mind, that
in a healthy society this maintenance of a particular level of
culture is to the benefit, not merely of the class which main-
tains it, but of the society as a whole. Awareness of this fact
will prevent us from supposing that the culture of a ‘higher’
class is something superfluous to society as a whole, or to the
majority, and from supposing that it is something which
ought to be shared equally by all other classes. It should also
remind the ‘higher’ class, in so far as any such exists, that
the survival of the culture in which it is particularly interest-
ed is dependent upon the health of the culture of the people.

It has now become a commonplace of contemporary
thinking, that a society thus artictdated is not the highest

^ I am anxious to avoid speaking as if the evolution of primitive
culture to higher forms was a process which we knew by observation.
We observe the differences, we infer that some have developed from a
stage similar to that of the lower stages which we observe: but however
legitimate oiar inference, I am here not concerned with that development.

35

T%e Class and the Elite

type to which we may aspire; but that it is indeed in the
natiire of things for a progressive society eventually to over-
come these divisions, and that it is also within the power of
our conscious direction, and therefore a duty incumbent
upon us, to bring about a classless society. But while it is
generally supposed that class, in any sense which maintains
associations of the past, will disappear, it is now the opinion
of some of the most advanced minds that some qualitatiye
differences between individuals must still be recognised, and .
that the superior individuals must be formed into suitable
groups, endowed with appropriate powers, and perhaps with
varied emoluments and honours. Those groups, formed of
individuals apt for powers of government and admin-
istration, will direct the public life of the nation; the indi-
viduals composing them will be spoken of as ‘leaders’.
There will be groups concerned with art, and groups con-
cerned with science, and groups concerned with philosophy,
as well as groups consisting of men of action: and these
groups are what we call dlites.

It is obvious, that while in the present state of society
there is found the volimtary association of like-minded
individuals, and association based upon common material
interest, or common occupation or profession, the elites of
the future will differ in one important respect from any that
we know: they will replace the classes of the past, whose
positive functions they will assume. This transformation is
not always explicitly stated. There are some philosophers
who regard class divisions as intolerable, and others who
regard them merely as moribund. The latter may simply
ignore class, in their design for an 41ite-governed society,
and say that the dlites will ‘be drawn from all sections of
society’. But it would seem that as we perfect the means for
identifying at an early age, educating for their future role,
and settling into positions of authority, the individuals who
will form the Elites, all former class distinctions will become
a mere shadow or vestige, and the only social distinction of
rank will be between the dikes and the rest of the commu-
nity, unless, as may happen, there is to be an order of pre-

36

The Class and the Elite

cedence and prestige amongst the several dikes themselves.

However moderately and unobtrusively the doctrine of
elites is put, it implies a radical transformation of society.
Superficially, it appears to aim at no more than what we
must all desire — ^that all positions in society should he occu-
pied by those who are best fitted to exercise the functions of
the positions. We have all observed individuals occupying
situations in life for which neither their character nor their
intellect qualified them, and so placed only through nominal
education, or birth or consanguinity. No honest man but is
vexed by such a spectacle. But the doctrine of dikes implies a
good deal more than the rectification of such injustice. It
posits an atomic view of society.

The philosopher whose views on the subject of elites
deserve the closest attention, both for their own value and
because of the influence they exert, is the late Dr. Karl
Mannheim. It is, for that matter. Dr. Mannheim who has
founded the fortunes, in this country, of the term dike. I
must remark that Dr. Mannheim’s description of culture is
different from that given in the previous chapter of this
essay. He says {Man and Society, p. 81):

A sociological investigation of culture in liberal society must begin
with the life of those who create culture, i.e. the intelligentsia and
their position within society as a whole.

According to the account which I have given, a ‘culture’ is
conceived as the creation of the society as a whole: being,
from another aspect, that which makes it a society. It is not
the creation of any one part of that society. The function of
what Dr. Mannheim would call the culture-creating groups,
according to my account, would be rather to bring about a
further development of the culture in organic complexity:
culture at a more conscious level, but still the same culture.
This higher level of ctdture must be thought of both as
valuable in itself, and as enriching of the lower levels: thus
the movement of culture would proceed in a kind of cycle,
each class nourishing the others.

This is, already, a difference of some importance. My next

57

The Class and the Elite

observation is that Dr. Mannheim is concerned rather with
dlites than with an ilite.

We may distinguish (he says, in Man and Society, p. 82) the follow-
ing types of Elites: the political, the organising, the intellectual, the
artistic, the moral and the religious. Whereas the political and organi-
sing elites aim at integrating a great number of individual wills, it is
the function of the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral-rehgious elites to
sublimate those psychic energies which society, in the daily struggle for
existence, does not fully exhaust.

This departmentalisation of dlites already exists, to some
extent 5 and to some extent it is a necessary and a good thing.
But, so far as it can be observed to exist, it is not altogether
a good thing. I have suggested elsewhere that a growing
weakness of our culture ha$ been the increasing isolation of
dlites from each other, so that the political, the philosophical,
the artistic, the scientific, are separated to the great loss of
each of them, not merely through the arrest of any general
circulation of ideas, but through the lack of those contacts
and mutual influences at a less conscious level, which are
perhaps even more important than ideas. The problem of
the formation, preservation and development of the dlites is
therefore also the problem of the formation, preservation
and development of the dlite, a problem upon which Dr.
Mannheim does not touch.

As an introduction to this problem, I must draw attention
to another difference between my view and that of Dr.
Mannheim. He observes, in a passage which I think contains
a profound truth (p. 85) :

The crisis of culture in liberal-democratic society is due, in the
first place, to the fact that the fundamental social processes, which
previously favoured the development of the culturally creative dlites,
now have the opposite effect, i.e. have become obstacles to the forming
of (Elites because wider sections of the population take an active part in
cultural activities.

I cannot, of course, admit the last clause of this sentence as
it stands. According to my view of culture, the whole of the
population should ‘take an active part in cultural activities’—
not all in the same activities or on the same level. What this

, m ' '

The Class and the Elite

clause means, in my terms, is that an increasing proportion
of the population is concerned with group culture. This
comes about, I think Dr. Mannheim would agree, through
the gradual alteration of the class-structure. But at this
point it seems to me that Dr. Mannheim begins to confuse
dlite with class. For he says (p. 89):

If one calls to mind the essential forms of selecting elites which up
to the present have appeared on the historical scene, three principles
can be distinguished: selection on the basis of blood, property and
achievement. Aristocratic society, especially after it had entrenched it-
self, chose its ehtes primarily on the blood principle. Bourgeois society
gradually introduced, as a supplement, the principle of wealth, a
principle which also obtained for the inteUectual elite, inasmuch as
education was more or less available only to the offspring of the well-
to-do. It is, of course, true that the principle of achievement was com-
bined with the two other principles in earlier periods, but it is the
important contribution of modern democracy as long as it is rigorous,
that the achievement principle increasingly tends to become the
criterion of social success.

I am ready to accept, in a rough and ready way, this account
of three historical periods. But I wotold remark that we are
here not concerned with Elites but with classes or, more pre-
cisely, with the evolution from a class to a classless society.
It seems to me that at the stage of the sharpest division into
classes we can distinguish an dlite also. Are we to believe
that the artists of the middle ages were all men of noble
rank, or that the hierarchy and the statesmen were all
selected according to their pedigrees?

I do not think that this is what Dr. Mannheim wishes us
to believe 5 but I think that he is confusing the dlites with
the dominant section of society which the dlites served,
from which they took their colour, and into which some of
their individual members were recruited. The general
scheme of the transition of society, in the last five hundred
years or so, is usually accepted, and I have no interest in
questioning it. I would only propose one qualification. At the
stage of dominance of bourgeois society (I think it wordd be
better to say, for this country, ‘upper middle class society’)
there is a difference applying particularly to England. How-

59

The Class and the Elite

ever powerful it was — ^for its power is now commonly said
to be passing — ^it would not have been what it was, without
the existence of a class above it, from which it drew some of
its ideals and some of its criteria, and to the condition of
which its more ambitious members aspired. This gives it a
difference in kind from the aristocratic society which pre-
ceded it, and from the mass-society which is expected to
follow it.

I now come to another passage in Dr. Mannheim’s discus-
sion, which seems to me profoundly true. His intellectual
integrity prevents him from dissimulating the gloom of our
present position^ but he succeeds, so far as I can judge, in
communicating to most of his readers a feeling of active
hopefulness, by infecting them with his own passionate
faith in the possibilities of ‘planning’. Yet he says quite
clearly;

We have no clear idea how the selection of dlites would work in an
open mass society in which only the principle of achievement mattered.
It is possible that in such a society, the succession of the dhtes would
take place much too rapidly and social continuity which is essentially
due to the slow and gradual broadening of the influence of the domi-
nant groups would be lacking in it.^

This raises a problem of the first importance to my present
discussion, with which I do not think Dr. Mannheim has
dealt in any detail: that of the transmission of culture.

When we are concerned with the history of certain parts
of culture, such as the history of art, or of literature, or of
philosophy, we naturally isolate a particular class of pheno-
mena; though there has been a movement, which has pro-
duced books of interest and value, to relate these subjects
more closely to a general social history. But even such,
accounts are usually only the history of one class of pheno-
mena interpreted in the light of the history of another class
of phenomena and, like that of Dr. Mannheim, tend to take
a more limited view of culture than that adopted here.

1 Dr. Mannheim proceeds to call attention to a tendency in mass -
society to renounce even the achievement principle. This passage is
important; but as I agree with him that the dangers from this are still
more alarming, it is unnecessary to quote it here.

40

The Class and the Elite

What we have to consider is the parts played by the elite
and by the class in the transmission of culture from one
generation to the next.

We must remind ourselves of the danger, mentioned in
the previous chapter, of identifying cultirre with the sum of
distinct cultmal activities^ and if we avoid this identification
we shall also decline to identify our group culture with the
sum of the activities of Dr. Mannheim’s dlites. The anthro-
pologist may study the social system, the economics, the arts,
and the religion of a particular tribe, he may even study
their psychological peculiarities: but it is not merely by
observing in detail all of these manifestations, and grasping
them together, that he will approach to an understanding
of the culture. For to understand the culture is to under-
stand the people, and this means an imaginative understand-
ing. Such understanding can never be complete; either it is
abstract — and the essence escapes — or else it is lived-, and in
so far as it is lived, the student will tend to identify himself
so completely with the people whom he studies, that he will
lose the point of view from which it was worth while and
possible to study it. Understanding involves an area more
extensive than that of which one can be conscious; one
cannot be outside and inside at the same time. What we
ordinarily mean by understanding of another people, of
course, is an approximation towards understanding which
stops short at the point at which the student would begin to
lose some essential of his own culture. The man who, in
order to understand the inner world of a cannibal tribe, has
partaken of the practice of cannibalism, has probably gone
too far: he can never quite be one of his own folk again.^

I have raised this question, however, solely in support of
my contention that cultme is not merely the sum of several
activities, but a way of life. Now the specialist of genius, who
may be fully qualified on the ground of his vocational attain-
ment for membership of one of Dr. Mannheim’s dlites, may
very well not be one of the ‘cultured persons’ representative
of group culture. As I have said before, he may be only a

1 Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness gives a hint of something similar.

41

The Class and the Elite

highly valued contributor to it. Yet group culture, as obsoi'
able in the past, has never been co-extensive with, cl a.
whether an aristocracy or an upper middle class. A
large number of members of these classes always have
conspicuously deficient in ‘culture’. I think that in the
the repository of this culture has been the dlite, the ro.a.j
part of which was drawn from the dominant class of 't-
time, constituting the primary consumers of the worl?^
thought and art produced by the minority members ^ ‘vv.
will have originated from various classes, including
class itself. The units of this majority will, some of therrx ,
individuals, others will be families. But the individuals fx'O
the dominant class who compose the nucleus of the cixl tisiJ
elite must not thereby be cut off from the class to which t:h
belong, for without their membership of that class th
would not have their part to play. It is their function ,
relation to the producers, to transmit the culture which 'th
have inherited^ just as it is their function, in relation to t.
rest of their class, to keep it from ossification. It is the £m.i
tion of the class a a whole to preserve and commuinioa
standards of manners — ^which are a vital element in gi'O'i
culture.^ It is the function of the superior members a. 3
superior families to preserve the group culture, as it is tl
function of the producers to alter it.

In an elite composed of individuals who find their "Wi
into it solely for their individual pre-eminence, the diffc
ences Of background will be so great, that they will be nni ti
only by their common interests, and separated by evor
thing else. An dlite must therefore be attached to some clai
whether higher or lower: but so long as there are classes
all it is likely to be the dominant class that attracts this ^li
to itself. What would happen in a classless society — ^whicla.
much more difficult to envisage than people think — 'bri n,

^ To avoid misunderstanding at this point, it should be observed. t:li
I do not assume that ‘good manners’ should be peculiar to any o:
stratum of society. In a healthy society, good manners should be fo^ai
throughout. But as w^e distinguish between the meanings of ‘cultnx-cs’
the several levels, so we distinguish also between the meanings of xxxa
and less conscious ‘good manners’.

42

The Class and the Klite

us into the area of conjecture. There are, however, some
guesses which seem to me worth venturing.

The primary channel of transmission of culture is the
family: no man wholly escapes from the kind, or wholly sur-
passes the degree, of culture which he acquired from his
early environment. It would not do to suggest that this can
be the only channel of transmission: in a society of any com-
plexity it is supplemented and continued by other conduits
of tradition. Even in relatively primitive societies this is so.
In more civilised communities of specialised activities, in
which not all the sons would follow the occupation of their
father, the apprentice (ideally, at least) did not merely serve
his master, and did not merely learn from him as one would
learn at a technical school — he became assimilated into a
way of life which went with that particular trade or craftj
and perhaps the lost secret of the craft is this, that not merely
a skill but an entire way of life was transmitted. Culture —
distinguishable from knowledge about culture — ^was trans-
mitted by the older universities: young men have profited
there who have been profitless students, and who have ac-
quired no taste for learning, or for Gothic architecture, or
for college ritual and form. I suppose that something of the
same sort is transmitted also by societies of the masonic type:
for initiation is an introduction into a way of life, of however
restricted viability, received from the past and to be perpetu-
ated in the future. But by far the most important channel of
transmission of culture remains the family: and when
family life fails to play its part, we must expect our culture
to deteriorate. Now the family is an institution of which
nearly everybody speaks well: but it is advisable to remem-
ber that this is a term that may vary in extension. In the
present age it means little more than the living members.
Even of living members, it is a rare exception when an
advertisement depicts a large family or three generations:
the usual family on the hoardings consists of two parents
and one or two young children. What is held up for admira-
tion is not devotion to a family, but personal affection be-
tween the members of it: and the smaller the family, the

45

The Class and the Elite

more easily can this personal affection be sentimentalised.
But when I speak of the family, I have in mind a bond
which embraces a longer period of time than this: a piety
towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the
unborn, however remote. Unless this reverence for past and
future is cultivated in the home, it can never be more than
a verbal convention in the community. Such an interest in
the past is different from the vanities and pretensions of
genealogy; such a responsibility for the future is different
from that of the builder of social programmes.

I should say then that in a vigorous society there will be
visible both class and elite, with some overlapping and con-
stant interaction between them. An dlite, if it is a governing
dlite, and so far as the natural impulse to pass on to one’s
offspring both power and prestige is not artificially checked,
will tend to establish itself as a class — ^it is this metamorpho-
sis, I think, which leads to what appears to me an oversight
on the part of Dr. Mannheim. But an dlite which thus trans-
forms itself tends to lose its function as elite, for the qualities
by which the original members won their position, will not
all be transmitted equally to their descendants. On the other
hand, we have to consider what would be the consequence
when the converse took place, and we had a society in which
the functions of class were assumed by dlites. Dr. Mannheim
seems to have believed that this will happen; he showed him-
self, as a passage which I have quoted shows, aware of the
dangers; and he does not appear to have been ready to pro-
pose definite safeguards against them.

The situation of a society without classes, and dominated
exclusively by dlites is, I submit, one about which we have
no reliable evidence. By such a society, I suppose we must
mean one in which every individual starts without advan-
tage or handicap; and in which, by some mechanism set up
by the best designers of such machinery, everybody will find
his way, or be directed, to that station of life which he is best
fitted to fill, and every position will be occupied by the man
or woman best fitted for it. Of course, not even the most
sanguine would expect the system to work as well as that:

44

The Class and the Elite

if, by and large, it seemed to come nearer to putting the
right people in the right places than any previous system,
we should all be satisfied. When I say ‘dominated’, rather
than ‘governed’ by elites, I mean that such a society must
not be content to be governed by the right people: it must
see that the ablest artists and architects rise to the top, influ-
ence taste, and execute the important public commissions;
it must do the same by the other arts and by science; and
above all, perhaps, it must be such that the ablest minds will
find expression in speculative thought. The system must not
only do all this for society in a particular situation — it must
go on doing it, generation after generation. It would be folly
to deny that in a particular phase of a country’s develop-
ment, and for a limited purpose, an dlite can do a very good
job. It may, by expelling a previous governing group, which
in contrast to itself may be a class, save or reform or revita-
lise the national life. Such things have happened. But we
have very little evidence about the perpetuation of govern-
ment by dlite, and such as we have is unsatisfactory. A con-
siderable time must elapse before we can draw any illustra-
tion from Russia. Russia is a rude and vigorous country; it is
also a very big country; and it will need a long period of
peace and internal development. Three things may happen.
Russia may show us how a stable government and a flourish-
ing culture can be transmitted only through dlites; it may
lapse into oriental lethargy; or the governing dlite may
follow the course of other governing elites and become a
governing class. Nor can we rely upon any evidence from
the United States of America. The real revolution in that
country was not what is called the Revolution in the history
books, but is a consequence of the Civil War; after which
arose a plutocratic dlite; after which the expansion and
material development of the country was accelerated; after
which was swollen that stream of mixed immigration, bring-
ing (or rather multiplying) the danger of development into
a caste system^ which has not yet been quite dispelled. For
I believe that the essential difference between a caste and a class
system is that the basis of the former is a difference such that the
dominant class comes to consider itself a superior race.

45

The Class and the Elite

the sociologist, the evidence from America is not yet ripe.
Our other evidence for government by dlite comes chiefly
from France. A governing class, which, during a long period
in which the Throne was all-powerful, had ceased to govern,
was reduced to the ordinary level of citizenship. Modern
France has had no governing class: her political life in the
Third Republic, whatever else we may say of it, was un-
settled. And here we may remark that when a dominant
class, however badly it has performed its function, is forcibly
removed, its function is not wholly taken over by any other.
The 'flight of the wild geese’ is perhaps a symbol of the
harm that England has done to Ireland — more serious, from
this point of view, than the massacres of Cromwell, or any
of the grievances which the Irish most gladly recall. It may
be, too, that England has done more harm to Wales and
Scotland by gently attracting their upper classes to certain
public schools, than by the wrongs (some real, some imagin-
ary, some misunderstood) voicedby their respective national-
ists. But here again, I wish to reserve judgment about
Russia. That country, at the time of its revolution, may still
have been at so early a stage of its development, that the
removal of its upper class may prove not only not to have
arrested that development but to have stimulated it. There
are, however, some grounds for believing that the elimina-
tion of an upper class at a more developed stage can be a
disaster for a country: and most certainly when that removal
is due to the intervention of another nation.

I have, in the preceding paragraphs, been speaking
mainly of the ‘governing class’ and the ‘governing dlite’.
But I must remind the reader again that in concerning our-
selves with class versus dlite, we are concerned with the total
culture of a country, and that involves a good deal more than
government. We can yield ourselves with some confidence
to a governing elite, as the republican Romans surrendered
power to dictators, so long as we have in view a defined
purpose in a crisis — and a crisis may last a long time. This
limited purpose also makes it possible to choose the dlite, for
we know what we are choosing it for. But, if we are looking

46

The Class and the Elite

for a way to select the right people to constitute every 41ite,
for an indefinite future, by what mechanism are we to do
this? If our ‘purpose’ is only to get the best people, in every
walk of life, to the top, we lack a criterion of who are the
best people 5 or, if we impose a criterion, it will have an
oppressive effect upon novelty. The new work of genius,
whether in art, science or philosophy, frequently meets with
opposition.

All that concerns me at the moment is the question
whether, by education alone, we can ensure the transmission
of culture in a society in which some educationists appear in-
different to class distinctions, and from which some other
educationists appear to want to remove class distinctions
altogether. There is, in any case, a danger of interpreting
‘education’ to cover both too much and too little: too little,
when it implies that education is limited to what can be
taught 5 too much, when it implies that everything worth pre-
serving can be transmitted by teaching. In the society
desired by some reformers, what the family can transmit
will be limited to the minimum, especially if the child is to
be, as Mr. H. C. Dent hopes, manipulated by a unified
educational system ‘from the cradle to the grave’. And un-
less the child is classified, by the officials who will have the
task of sorting him out, as being just like his father, he will
be brought up in a different — ^not necessarily a better, be-
cause all will be equally good, but a different — school
environment, and trained on what the official opinion of
the moment considers to be ‘the genuinely democratic
lines’. The dlites, in consequence, will consist solely of indi-
viduals whose only common bond will be their professional
interest: with no social cohesion, with no social continuity.
They will be united only by a part, and that the most
conscious part, of their personalities 5 they wiU meet like
committees. The greater part of their ‘culture’ will be only
what they share with all the other individuals composing
their nation.

The case for a society with a class structure, the affirma-
tion that it is, in some sense, the ‘natural’ society, is preju-

47

The Class and the Elite

diced if we allow ourselves to be hypnotised by the two
contrasted terms aristocracy and democracy. The whole
problem is falsified if we use these terms antithetically.
What I have advanced is not a ‘defence of aristocracy’ — an
emphasis upon the importance of one organ of society.
Rather it is a plea on behalf of a form of society in which an
aristocracy should have a peculiar and essential function, as
peculiar and essential as the function of any other part of
society. What is important is a structure of society in which
there will be, from ‘top’ to ‘bottom’, a continuous gradation
of cultural levels: it is important to remember that we
should not consider the upper levels as possessing more cul-
ture than the lower, but as representing a more conscious
culture and a greater specialisation of culture. I incline to
believe that no true democracy can maintain itself unless it
contains these different levels of culture. The levels of cul-
ture may also be seen as levels of power, to the extent that
a smaller group at a higher level will have equal power
with a larger group at a lower level j for it may be argued
that complete equality means universal irresponsibility^ and
in such a society as I envisage, each individual would inherit
greater or less responsibility towards the commonwealth,
according to the position in society which he inherited —
each class would have somewhat different responsibilities.
A democracy in which everybody had an equal responsibility
in everything would be oppressive for the conscientious and
licentious for the rest.

There are other grounds upon which a graded society can
be defended^ and I hope, in general, that this essay will
suggest lines of thought that I shall not myself explore; but
I must constantly remind the reader of the limits of my sub-
ject. If we agree that the primary vehicle for the trans-
mission of culture is the family, and if we agree that in a
more highly civilised society there must be different levels
of culture, then it follows that to ensure the transmission of
the culture of these different levels there must be groups of
families persisting, from generation to generation, each in
the same way of life.

48

The Class and the Elite

And once again I must repeat, that the ‘conditions of
culture’ which I set forth do not necessarily produce the
higher civilisation: I assert only that when they are absent,
the higher civilisation is unlikely to be found. ’

CHAPTER III

Unity and Diversity: The Region

A diversification among human communities is essential for the provi-
sion of the incentive and material for the Odyssey of the human spirit.
Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends.
Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be under-
stood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and some-
thing great enough to command admiration.

A. N. WHITEHEAD: Science and the Modern World

It is a recurrent theme of this essay, that a people should
be neither too united nor too divided, if its culture is to
flourish. Excess of unity may be due to barbarism and
may lead to tyranny^ excess of division may be due to deca-
dence and may also lead to tyranny: either excess will pre-
vent further development in culture. The proper degree of
unity and of diversity cannot be determined for all peoples
at all times. We can only state and illustrate some depart-
ments in which excess or defect is dangerous: what is neces-
sary, beneficial or deleterious for a particular people at a
particular time, must be left to the wisdom of the sage and
the insight of the statesman. Neither a classless society, nor
a society of strict and impenetrable social barriers is goodj
each class should have constant additions and defections 5 the
classes, while remaining distinct, should be able to mix
freely 5 and they should all have a community of culture
with each other which will give them something in common,
more fundamental than the community which each class
has with its counterpart in another society. In the previous
chapter we considered the special developments of culture
by class: we have now to consider the special developments
of culture by region.

50

Unity and Diversity: the Region

Of the advantages of administrative and sentimental
unity we hardly need to be reminded, after the experience
of war; but it is often assumed that the unity of wartime
should be preserved in time of peace. Amongst any people
engaged in warfare, especially when the war appears, or can
be made to appear, purely defensive, we may expect a spon-
taneous unity of sentiment which is genuine, an affectation
of it on the part of those who merely wish to escape odium,
and, from all, submission to the commands of the constituted
authorities. We should hope to find the same harmony and
docility among the survivors of a shipwreck adrift in a life-
boat. People often express regret that the same unity,
self-sacrifice and fraternity which prevail in an emergency,
cannot survive the emergency itself. Most audiences at
Barrie’s play. The Admirable Crichton, have drawn the
inference that the social organisation on the island was right,
and that the social organisation at the country seat was
wrong: I am not sure that Barrie’s play is not susceptible of
a different interpretation. We must distinguish at all events
between, the kind of unity which is necessary in an emer-
gency, and that which is appropriate for the development of
culture in a nation at peace. It is conceivable, of course, that
a period of ‘peace’ may be a period of preparation for war, or
of continuation of warfare in another form: in which situa-
tion we may expect a deliberate stimulation of patriotic
sentiment and a rigorous central government control. It
might be expected, too, in such a period, that ‘economic
warfare’ would be conducted by strict government discipline,
not left to the guerillas and privateers of enterprise. But I
am concerned here with the kind and degree of unity
desirable in a country which is at peace with other countries:
for if we cannot have periods of real peace, it is futile to hope
for culture at all. The kind of unity with which I am con-
cerned is not expressible as a common enthusiasm or a
common purpose: enthusiasms and purposes are always
transient.

The unity with which I am concerned must be largely
unconscious, and therefore can perhaps be best approached

51

Unity and Diversity: the Region

through a consideration of the useful diversities. Here I have
to do with diversity of region. It is important that a man
should feel himself to he, not merely a citizen of a particular
nation, but a citizen of a particular part of his country, with
local loyalties. These, like loyalty to class, arise out of loyalty
to the family. Certainly, an individual may develop the
warmest devotion to a place in which he was not horn, and
to a community with which he has no ancestral ties. But I
think we should agree that there would he something artifi-
cial, something a little too conscious, about a community of
people with strong local feeling, all of whom had come from
somewhere else. I think we should say that we must wait
for a generation or two for a loyalty which the inhabitants
had inherited, and which was not the result of a conscious
choice. On the whole, it would appear to be for the best that
the great majority of human beings should go on living in
the place in which they were born. Family, class and local
loyalty all support each others and if one of these decays, the
others will suffer also.

The problem of ‘regionalism’ is seldom contemplated in
its proper perspective. I introduce the term ‘regionalism’
deliberately, because of the associations which it is apt to
conjure up. It means, I think, to most people, the conception
of some small group of local malcontents conducting a politi-
cal agitation which, because it is not formidable, is regarded
as ludicrous — for any movement for what is assumed to be a
lost cause always excites ridicule. We expect to find ‘regiona-
lists’ attempting to revive some language which is disappear-
ing and ought to disappear^ or to revive customs of a by-
gone age which have lost all significance 5 or to obstruct the
inevitable and accepted progress of mechanisation and large-
scale industry. The champions of local tradition, indeed,
often fail to make the best of their case; and when, as some-
times happens, they are most vigorously opposed and derided
by others among their own people, the outsider feels that he
has no reason to take them seriously. They sometimes mis-
conceive their own case. They are inclined to formulate the
remedy wholly in political terms; and as they may be politi-

52

Unity and Diversity: the Region

cally inexperienced, and at the same time are agitated by
deeper than political motives, their programmes may be
patently impracticable. And when they put forward an
economic programme, there, too, they are handicapped by
having motives which go deeper than economics, in contrast
with men who have the reputation of being practical.
Furthermore, the usual regionalist is concerned solely with
the interests of his own region, and thereby suggests to his
neighbour across the border, that what is to the interest of
one must be to the disadvantage of the other. The English-
man, for instance, does not ordinarily think of England as a
‘region’ in the way that a Scottish or Welsh national can
think of Scotland or Walesj and as it is not made clear to him
that his interests also are involved, his sympathies are not
enlisted. Thus the Englishman may identify his own interests
with a tendency to obliterate local and racial distinctions,
which is as harmful to his own culture as to those of his
neighbours. Until the case is generalised, therefore, it it not
likely to meet with a fair hearing.

At this point the professed regionalist, if he reads these
pages, may suspect tWt I am playing a trick which he sees
through. What I ani* p to, he may think, is trying to deny
him the political and economic autonomy of his region, and
appease him by offering him a substitute, ‘cultural auto-
nomy’, which, because it is divorced from political and
economic power, will only be a shadow of the real thing. I am
quite aware that the political, the economic and the cultural
problems cannot be isolated from each other. I am quite
aware that any local ‘cultural revival’ which left the political
and economic framework unaffected, would hardly be more
than an artificially sustained antiquarianism: what is wanted
is not to restore a vanished, or to revive a vanishing culture
under modern conditions which make it impossible, but to
grow a contemporary culture from the old roots. But the
political and economic conditions of healthy regionalism are
not the concern of the present essay; nor are they matters
on which I am qualified to pronounce. Nor, I think, should
the political or the economic problem be the primary

53

Unity and Diversity: the Region

concern of the true regionalist. The absolute value is that each
area should have its characteristic culture, which should also
harmonise with, and enrich, the cultures of the neighbour-
ing areas. In order to realise this value it. is necessary to
investigate political and economic alternatives to centralisa-
tion in London or elsewhere: and here, it is a question of the
possible — of what can be done which will support this abso-
lute value of culture, without injury to the island as a whole
and by consequence to that part of it also in which the
regionalist is interested. But this is beyond my scope.

We are, you will have noticed, primarily concerned with
the particular constellation of cultures which is found in the
British Isles. The clearest among the differences to be con-
sidered is that of the areas which still possess languages of
their own. Even this division is not so simple as it looks: for
a people (like the English-speaking Irish) which has lost its
language may preserve enough of the structure, idiom,
intonation and rhythm of its original tongue (vocabulary is
of minor importance) for its speech and writing to have
qualities not elsewhere found in the language of its adop-
tion. And on the other hand a ‘dialect’ may preserve the
vestiges, on the lowest level of culture, of a variety of the
language which once had equal status with any. But the un-
mistakable satellite culture is one which preserves its lan-
guage, but which is so closely associated with, and dependent
upon, another, that not only certain classes of the popula-
tion, but all of them, have to be bi-lingual. It differs from
the culture of the independent small nation in this respect,
that in the latter it is usually only necessary for some classes
to know another language 5 and in the independent small
nation, those who need to know one foreign language are
likely to need two or three: so that the pull towards one
foreign culture will be balanced by the attraction of at least
one other. A nation of weaker culture niay be under the
influence of one or another stronger culture at different
periods: a true satellite culture is one which, for geographi-
cal and other reasons, has a permanent relation to a stronger
one.

54

Unity and Diversity: the Region

When we consider what I call the satellite culture, we
find two reasons against consenting to its complete absorption
into the stronger culture. The first objection is one so pro-
found that it must simply be accepted: it is the instinct of
every living thing to persist in its own being. The resent-
ment against absorption is sometimes most strongly felt, and
most loudly voiced, by those individuals in whom it is united
with an unacknowledged awareness of inferiority or failure;
and on the other hand it is often repudiated by those indivi-
duals for whom adoption into the stronger culture has meant
success — greater power, prestige or wealth than could have
been theirs had their fortunes been circumscribed by their
area of origin.^- But when the testimony of both these types
of individual has been discounted, we may say that any
vigorous small people wants to preserve its individuality.

The other reason for the preservation of local culture is
one which is also a reason for the satellite culture continuing
to be satellite, and not going so far as to try to cut itself off
completely. It is that the satellite exercises a considerable
influence upon the stronger culture; and so plays a larger
part in the world at large than it could in isolation. For Ire-
land, Scotland and Wales to cut themselves off completely
from England would be to cut themselves off from Europe
and the world, and no talk of auld alliances would help
matters. But it is the other side of the question that interests
me more, for it is the side that has received less acknowledg-
ment. It is that the survival of the satellite culture is of very
great value to the stronger culture. It would be no gain
whatever for English culture, for the Welsh, Scots and Irish
to become indistinguishable from Englishmen — ^what would
happen, of course, is that we should all become indistinguish-
able featureless ‘Britons’, at a lower level of culture than
that of any of the separate regions. On the contrary, it is of
great advantage for English culture to be constantly influ-
enced from Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

^ It is not unknown, however, that the successful self-exile sometimes
manifests an exaggerated sentiment towards his native region, to which
he may return for his holidays, or to enjoy the affluent retirement of his
declining years.

55

Unity and Diversity : the Region

A people is judged by history according to its contribution
to the culture of other peoples flourishing at the same time
and according to its contribution to the cultures which arise
afterwards. It is from this point of view that I look at the
question of the preservation of languages — I am not inter-
ested in languages in an advanced state of decay (that is to
say, when they are no longer adequate to the needs of
expression of the more educated members of the commu-
nity). It is sometimes considered an advantage, and a source
of glory, that one’s own language should be a necessary
medium for as many foreigners as possible: I am not sure
that this popularity is without grave dangers for any lan-
guage. A less dubious advantage of certain languages which
are native to large numbers of people, is that they have be-
come, because of the work done by scientists and philoso-
phers who have thought in those languages, and because of
the traditions thus created, better vehicles than others for
scientific and abstract thought. The case for the more re-
stricted languages must be put on grounds which have less
immediate appeal.

The question we may ask about such a language as Welsh,
is whether it is of any value to the world at large, that it
should be used in Wales. But this is really as much as to ask
whether the Welsh, qua Welsh, are of any use? not, of
course, as human beings, but as the preservers and con-
tinuers of a culture which is not English. The direct contri-
bution to poetry by Welshmen and men of Welsh extraction,
writing in English, is very considerablej and considerable
also is the influence of their poetry upon poets of different
racial origins. The fact that an extensive amount of poetry
has been written in the Welsh language, in the ages when
the English language was unknown in Wales, is of less direct
importance: for there appears no reason why this should not
be studied by those who will take the trouble to learn the
language, on the same terms as poetry written in Latin or
Greek. On the surface, there would seem to be every reason
why Welsh poets should compose in the English language
exclusively: for I know of no instance of a poet having

56

Unity and Diversity; the Region

reached the first rank in both languages^ and the Welsh
influence upon English poetry has been the work chiefly of
Welsh poets who wrote only in English. But it must be

remembered, that for the transmission of a culture a

peculiar way of thinking, feeling and behaving — and for its
maintenance, there is no safeguard more reliable than a
language. And to survive for this purpose it must continue
to be a literary language — not necessarily a scientific lan-
guage but certainly a poetic one: otherwise the spread of
education will extinguish it. The literature written in that
language will not, of course, make any direct impact upon
the world at large; but if it is no longer cultivated, the
people to whom it belongs (we are considering particularly
the Welsh) will tend to lose their racial character. The Welsh
will be less Welsh; and their poets will cease to have any
contribution to make to English literature, beyond their
individual genius. And I am of opinion, that the benefits
which Scottish, Welsh and Irish writers have conferred upon
English literature are far in excess of what the contribution
of all these individual men of genius would have been had
they, let us say, all been adopted in early infancy by English
foster-parents.

I am not concerned, in an essay which aims at least at the
merit of brevity, to defend the thesis, that it is desirable
that the English should continue to be English. I am obliged
to take that for granted: and if this assumption is called into
question, I must defend it on another occasion. But if I can
defend with any success the thesis, that it is to the advantage
of England that the Welsh should continue to be Welsh, the
Scots Scots and the Irish Irish, then the reader should be
disposed to agree that there may be some advantage to other
peoples in the English continuing to be English. It is an
essential part of my case, that if the other cultures of the
British Isles were wholly superseded by English culture,
English culture would disappear too. Many people seem to
take for granted that English culture is something self-
sufficient and secure; that it will persist whatever happens.
While some refuse to admit that any foreign influence can

57

Unity and Diversity: the Region

be bad, others assume complacently that English culture
could flourish in complete isolation from the Continent. To
many it has never occurred to reflect that the disappearance
of the peripheral cultures of England (to say nothing of the
more humble local peculiarities within England itself)
might be a calamity. We have not given enough attention
to the ecology of cultures. It is probable, I think, that com-
plete uniformity of culture throughout these islands would
bring about a lower grade of culture altogether.

It should be clear that I attempt no solution of the regional
problem; and the ‘solution’ woxild have in any case to vary
indefinitely according to local needs and possibilities. I am
trying only to take apart, and leave to others to reassemble,
the elements in the problem. I neither support nor dispute
any specific proposals for particular regional reforms. Most
attempts to solve the problem seem to me to suffer from a
failure to examine closely either the unity, or the differ-
ences, between the cultural, political and economic aspects.
To deal with one of these aspects, to the exclusion of the
others, is to produce a programme which will, because of its
inadequacy, appear a little absurd. If the nationalistic motive
in regionalism were pushed very far, it certainly would lead
to absurdity. The close association of the Bretons with the
French, and of the Welsh with the English, is to the advan-
tage of everybody: an association of Brittany and Wales
which ruptured their connexions with France and England
respectively, would be an unqualified misfortune. For a
national culture, if it is to flourish, should be a constellation
of cultures, the constituents of which, benefiting each other,
benefit the whole.

At this point I introduce a new notion: that of the vital
importance for a society of friction between its parts. Accus-
tomed as we are to think in figures of speech taken from
machinery, we assume that a society, like a machine, should
be as well-oiled as possible, provided with ball bearings of
the best steel. We think of friction as waste of energy. I shall
not attempt to substitute any other imagery; perhaps at this
point the less we think in analogies the better. In the last

58

Unity and Diversity: the Region

chapter I suggested that in any society which became perma-
nently established in either a caste or a classless system, the
culture would decay: one might even put it that a classless
society should always be emerging into class, and a class
society should be tending towards obliteration of its class
distinctions. I now suggest that both class and region, by
dividing tlie inhabitants of a country into two different
kinds of groups, lead to a conflict favourable to creativeness
and progress. And (to remind the reader of what I said in my
introduction) these are only two of an indefinite number of
conflicts and jealousies which should be profitable to society.
Indeed, the more the better; so that everyone should be an
ally of everyone else in some respects, and an opponent in
several others, and no one conflict, envy or fear will
dominate.

As individuals, we find that our development depends upon
the people whom we meet in the course of our lives. (These
people include the autliox's whose books we read, and charac-
ters in works of Action and history.) The benefit of these
meetings is due as raucli to the differences as to the resemb-
lances 5 to the conflict, as well as the sympathy, between
persons. Foxtunate the man who, at the right moment,
meets the right friend; fortunate also the man who at the
right moment meets the right enemy. I do not approve the
extermination of the enemy: the policy of exterminating or,
as is barbarously said, liqx.xi dating enexnies, is one of the most
alarming develo])ments of modern war and peace, from the
point of view of those who desire the survival of culture.
One needs the enemy. So, within limits, the friction, not
only lietwoen individuals but between groups, seems to me
quite necessai-y for civilisation. The universality of irritation
is the best assurance of peace. A country within which the
divisions have gone too far is a danger to itself: a country
which is too wxdl united — ^whether by nature or by device,
by honest purpose or by fraud and oppression — is a menace
to others. In Italy and in Germany, we have seen that a
unity with politico-economic aims, imposed violently and
too rapidly, had unfox'tunate effects upon both nations. Their

69

Unity and Diversity: the Region

cultures had developed in the course of a history of extreme,
and extremely sub-divided regionalism; the attempt to teach
Germans to think of themselves as Germans first, and the
attempt to teach Italians to think of themselves as Italians
first, rather than as natives of a particular small principality
or city, was to disturb the traditional culture from which
alone any future culture could grow.

I may put the idea of the importance of conflict within a
nation more positively, by insisting on the importance of
various and sometimes conflicting loyalties. If we consider
these two divisions alone, of class and region, these ought to
some extent to operate against each other: a man should
have certain interests and sympathies in common with other
men of the same local culture as against those of his own
class elsewhere; and interests and sympathies in common
with others of his class, irrespective of place. Numerous
cross-divisions favour peace within a nation, by dispersing
and confusing animosities; they favour peace between
nations, by giving every man enough antagonism at home
to exercise all his aggressiveness. The majority of men
commonly dislike foreigners, and are easily inflamed against
them; and it is not possible for the majority to know much
about foreign peoples. A nation which has gradations of
class seems to me, other things being equal, likely to be
more tolerant and pacific than one which is not so organised.

So far, we have proceeded from the greater to the less,
finding a national culture to be the resultant of an indefinite
number of local cultures which, when themselves analysed,
are composed of still smaller local cultures. Ideally, each
village, and of course more visibly the larger towns, shoidd
have each its peculiar character. But I have already sug-
gested that a national culture is the better for being in con-
tact with outside cultures, both giving and receiving: and
we shall now proceed in the opposite direction, from the
smaller to the larger. As we go in this direction, we find that
the content of the term culture undergoes some change: the
word means something rather different, if we are speaking
of the culture of a village, of a small region, of ah. island like

60

Unity and Diversity: the Region

Britain which comprehends several distinct racial cultures 5
and the meaning is altered much more when we come to
speak of ‘European culture’. We have to abandon most of the
political associations, for whereas in such smaller units of
culture as I have just mentioned there is normally a certain
unity of government, the unity of government of the Holy
Roman Empire was, throughout most of the period covered
by the term, both precarious and largely nominal. Of the
nature of the unity of culture in Western Europe, I have
written in the three broadcast talks — composed for another
audience and therefore in a somewhat different style from
the body of this essay — which I have added as an appendix
under the title of ‘The Unity of European Culture’. I shall
not attempt to cover the same ground in this chapter, but
shall proceed to enquire what meaning, if any, can be
attached to the term ‘world culture’. The investigation of a
possible ‘world culture’ should be of particular interest to
those who champion any of the various schemes for world-
federation, or for a world government: for, obviously, so
long as there exist cultures which are beyond some point
antagonistic to each other, antagonistic to the point of ir-
reconcilability, all attempts at politico-economic unification
will be in vain. I say ‘beyond some point’, because in the
relations of any two cultures there will be two opposite
forces balancing each other: attraction and repulsion — ^with-
out the attraction they could not affect each other, and
without the repulsion they could not survive as distinct cul-
tures; one would absorb the other, or both would be fused
into one culture. Now the zealots of world-government seem
to m(> sometimes to assume, unconsciously, that their unity
of organisation has an absolute value, and that if differences
between cultures stand in the way, these must be abolished.
If these zealots are of the humanitarian type, they will
assume that this jwocess will take place naturally and pain-
lessly: tlu'y may, without knowing it, take for granted that
the final world-culture will be simply an extension of that
to which they l)elong themselves. Our Russian friends, who
are more realistic, if not in the long run any more practical,

61

Unity and Diversity: the Region

are much more conscious of irreconcilability between cult-
ures j and. appear to hold, the "view that eny culture incompat-
ible with their own should be forcibly uprooted.

The world-planners who are both serious and humane,
however, might— if we believed that their methods would
succeed — ^be as grave a menace to crdture as those who
practise more violent methods. For it must follow from
what I have already pleaded about the value of local cul-
tures, that a world culture which was simply a uniform
culture would be no culture at all. We should have a
humanity de-humanised. It would be a nightmare. But on
the other hand, we cannot resign the idea of world-cxdture
altogether. For if we content ourselves with the ideal of
‘European culture’ we shall still be unable to fix any definite
frontiers. European culture has an area, but no definite
frontiers: and you cannot build Chinese walls. The notion
of a purely self-contained European culture would be as fatal
as the notion of a self-contained national culture: in the end
as absurd as the notion of preserving a local uncontaminated
culture in a single county or village of England. We are
therefore pressed to maintain the ideal of a world culture,
while admitting that it is something we cannot imagine. We
can only conceive it, as the logical term of relations between
cultures. Just as we recognise that the parts of Britain must
have in one sense, a common culture, though this common
culture is only actual in diverse local manifestations, so we
must aspire to a common world cultme, which wih yet not
diminish the particularity of the constituent parts. And
here, of course, we are finally up against religion, which so
far, in the consideration of local differences within the same
area, we have not had to face. Ultimately, antagonistic
religions must mean antagonistic cultures 5 and ultimately,
religions cannot be reconciled. From the official Russian
point of view there are two objections to religion: first, of
course, that religion is apt to provide another loyalty than
that claimed by the State; and second, that there are several
religions in the world still firmly maintained by many
believers. The second objection is perhaps even more serious

62

Unity and Diversity: the Region

than the first; for where there is only one religion, it is
always possible that that religion may be subtly altered, so
that it will enjoin conformity rather than stimulate resis-
tance to the State.

We are the more likely to be able to stay loyal to the ideal
of the unimaginable world culture, if we recognise all the
difficulties, the practical impossibility, of its realisation. And
there are further difficulties which cannot be ignored. We
have so far considered cultures as if they had all come into
being by the same process of growth: the same people in the
same place. But tliere is the colonial problem, and the
colonisation problem; it is a pity that the world ‘colony’ has
had to do duty hn- two quite different meanings. The colonial
problem is tliat of tlie relation between an indigenous native
culture and a foreign culture, when a higher foreign cul-
ture has b('en imposed, often by force, upon a lower. This
problem is insoluble, and takes several forms. There is one
problem wlieu we come into contact with a lower culture
for the first time: there are very few places in the world
where this is still possible. There is another problem where
a native culture has already begun to disintegrate under
foreign influence, and where a native population has already
taken in more of the foreign culture than it can ever expel.
There is a third problem where, as in some of the West
Indies, sevc'ral uprooted peoples have been haphazardly
mixed. And these problems are insoluble, in the sense that,
whatever we do towards their solution or mitigation, we do
not altogether know what we are doing. We must be aware
of them 5 we must do wliat we can, so far as our understand-
ing will take usj but many more forces enter into the
chang(;s of the culture of a people than we can grasp and
control 5 and any positive and excellent development of cul-
ture is always a miracle when it happens.

The colonisation problem arises from migration. When
peoples migrated across Asia and Europe in pre-historic and
early times, it was a whole tribe, or at least a wholly repre-
sentative part of it, that moved together. Therefore, it was
a total culture that moved. In the migrations of modern

65

Unity and Diversity: the Region

times, the emigrants have come from countries already
highly civilised. They came from countries where the
development of social organisation was already complex. The
people who migrated have never represented the whole of
the culture of the country from which they came, or they
have represented it in quite different proportions. They have
transplanted themselves according to some social, religious,
economic or political determination, or some peculiar mix-
ture of these. There has therefore been something in the
removements analogous in nature to religious schism. The
people have taken with them only a part of the total culture
in which, so long as they remained at home, they partici-
pated. The culture which develops on the new soil must
therefore be hafflingly alike and different from the parent
culture: it will be complicated sometimes by whatever rela-
tions are established with some native race, and further by
immigration from other than the original source. In this
way, peculiar types of culture-sympathy and culture-clash
appear, between the areas populated by colonisation, and the
countries of Europe from which the migrants came.

There is finally the peculiar case of India, where almost
every complication is found to defeat the culture-planner.
There is stratification of society which is not purely social
but to some extent racial, in a Hindu world which compre-
hends peoples with an ancient tradition of high civilisation,
and tribesmen of very primitive culture indeed. There is
Brahminism and there is Islam. There are two or more
important cultures on completely different religious founda-
tions. Into this confused world came the British, with their
assurance that their own culture was the best in the world,
their ignorance of the relation between culture and religion,
and (at least since the nineteenth century) their bland
assumption that religion was a secondary matter. It is
human, when we do not understand another human being,
and cannot ignore him, to exert an unconscious pressure on
that person to turn him into something that we can under-
stand: many husbands and wives exert this pressure on each
other. The effect on the person so influenced is liable to be

64

Unity and Diversity: the Region

the repression and distortion, rather than the improvement,
of the personality; and no man is good enough to have the
right to make another over in his own image. The benefits
of British rule will soon he lost, but the ill effects of the
disturbance of a native culture by an alien one will remain.
To offer another people your culture first, and your religion
second, is a reversal of values: and while every European
represents, for good or ill, the culture to which he belongs,
only a small minority are worthy representatives of its reli-
gious faith.^ The only prospect of stability in India seems
the alternative of a development, let us hope under peace-
ful conditions, into a loose federation of kingdoms, or to a
mass uniformity attainable only at the price of the abolition
of class distinctions and the abandonment of all religion —
which would mean the disappearance of Indian culture.

I have thought it necessary to make this brief excursion
into the several types of culture relation between one nation
and the different kinds of foreign area, because the regional
problem within the nation has to be seen in this larger con-
text. There can be, of course, no one simple solution. As I
have said, the improvement and transmission of culture can
never be the direct object of any of our practical activities:
all we can do is to try to keep in mind that whatever we do
will affect our own culture or that of some other people. We
cal also learn to respect every other culture as a whole, how-
ever inferior to our own it may appear, or however justly
we may disapprove of some features of it: the deliberate
destruction of another culture as a whole is an irreparable
wrong, almost as evil as to treat human beings like animals.
But it is when we give our attention to the question of unity
and diversity within the limited area that we know best,
and within which we have the most frequent opportunities
for right action, that we can combat the hopelessness that
invades us, when we linger too long upon perplexities so far
beyond our measure.

^ It is interesting to speculate, even though we cannot prove our
conclusions, what would have happened to Western Europe had the
Roman conquest imposed a culture pattern which left the religious
beliefs and practices unaffected.

E

65

E.D.C.

Unity and Diversity : the Region

It was necessary to remind ourselves of those considerable
areas of the globe, in which the problem takes a different
form from ours; of those areas particularly, in which two or
more distinct cultures are so inextricably involved with each
other, in propinquity and in the ordinary business of living,
that ‘regionalism’, as we conceive it in Britain, would be a
mockery. For such areas it is probable that a very different
type of political philosophy should inspire political action,
from that in terms of which we are accustomed to think and
act in this part of the world. It is as well to have these differ-
ences at the back of our mind, that we may appreciate better
the conditions with which we have to deal at home. These
conditions are those of a homogeneous general culture,
associated with the traditions of one religion: given these
conditions, we can maintain the conception of a national
culture which will draw its vitality from the cultures of its
several areas, within each of which again there will be
smaller units of culture having their own local pecidiarities.

66

CHAPTER IV

Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult

In the first Chapter I tried to place myself at a point of
view, from which the same phenomena appear both
religious and cultural. In this chapter I shall be con-
cerned with the cultural significance of religious divisions.
While the considerations put forward should, if worthy of
being taken seriously, have a particular interest for those
Christians who are perplexed over the problem of Christian
reunion, they are primarily intended to show that Christian
divisions, and therefore schemes for Christian reunion,
should be of concern not only to Christians, but to everybody
except those who advocate a kind of society which would
break completely with the Christian tradition.

I asserted, in the first chapter, that in the most primitive
societies no clear distinction is visible between religious and
non-religious activitiesj and that as we proceed to ex-
amine the more developed societies, we perceive a greater
distinction, and finally contrast and opposition, between
these activities. The sort of identity of religion and culture
which we observe amongst peoples of very low development
cannot recur except in the New Jerusalem. A higher religion
is one which is much more difficult to believe. For the more
conscious becomes the belief, so the more conscious becomes
unbelief: indifference, doubt and scepticism appear, and the
endeavour to adapt the tenets of religion to what people in
each age find easiest to believe. In the higher religion, it is
more difficult also to make behaviour conform to the moral
laws of the religion. A higher religion imppses a conflict, a
division, torment and struggle within the individualj a

67

Unity and Diversity : Sect and Cult

conflict sometimes between the laity and the priesthood; a
conflict eventually between Church and State.

^ The reader may have difficulty in reconciling these asser-
tions with the point of view set forth in my first chapter,
according to which there is always, even in the most con-
scious and highly developed societies that we know, an aspect
of identity between the religion and the culture. I wish to
maintain both these points of view. We do not leave the
earlier stage of development behind us: it is that upon which
we build. The identity of religion and culture remains on
the unconscious level, upon which we have superimposed a
conscious structure wherein religion and culture are con-
trasted and can be opposed. The meaning of the terms ‘reli-
gion’ and ‘culture’ is of course altered between these two
levels. To the unconscious level we constantly tend to re-
vert, as we find consciousness an excessive burden; and the
tendency towards reversion may explain the powerful attrac-
tion which totalitarian philosophy and practice can exert
upon humanity. Totalitarianism appeals to the desire to
return to the womb. The contrast between religion and

O

culture imposes a strain: we escape from this strain by
attempting to revert to an identity of religion and culture
which prevailed at a more primitive stage; as when we
indulge in alcohol as an anodyne, we consciously seek un-
consciousness. It is only by unremitting effort that we can
persist in being individuals in a society, instead of merely
members of a disciplined crowd. Yet we remain members of
the crowd, even when we succeed in being individuals.
Hence, for the purposes of this essay, I am obliged to main-
tain two contradictory propositions: that religion and culture
are aspects of one unity, and that they are two different and
contrasted things.

I attempt, as far as possible, to contemplate my problems
from the point of view of the sociologist, and not from that
of the Christian apologist. Most of my generalisations are
intended to have some applicability to all religion, and not
only to Christianity; and when, as in what follows in this
chapter, I discuss Christian matters, that is because I am

68

Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult

particularly concerned with Christian culture, with the
Western World, with l^urope, and with England. In sayino-
that I aim at taking, as consistently as I can, the sociological
point of view, 1 must make clear that I do not think that the
difference between tlie religious and the sociological point of
view is so easily maintained as the difference between a
couple of adjectives miglit lead us to suppose. We may here
define the religious point of view, as that from which we ask
the question, wliother the tenets of a religion are true or
false. It follows tliat we shall be taking the religious point of
view, if w(! are atheists wliose thinking is based on the
assunqition that all religions are untrue. From the sociologi-
cal point of view, t.lu‘ trutli or falsity is irrelevant; we are
concc;rned oidy with the comparative effects of different
religious structures ti|)on culture. Now, if students of the
subject could he; lu'atly divided into theologians, including
atheists, and sociologists, tlie problem would be very differ-
ent from whiit it is. But, for one thing, no religion can be
wholly hinderstctod’ from the oiitside — even for the sociolo-
gist’s |:)ur])oses. For another, no one can wholly escape the
religious point of vienv, because in the end one either believes
or disb(‘li('ves. 'riierc'fore, no one can be as wholly detached
and disinterested as the ideal sociologist should be. The
reader accordingly must try, not only to make allowance for
the rtdigious vi(‘ws of the author, but, what is more difficult,
to malv(' allowance' for his own — and he may never have
examined thoroughly his own mind. So both writer and
render must hf' on guard against assuming that they are
wholly (h'tached.'

W(' have now to consider unity and diversity in religious
belief and j)ractice, and entpiire what is the situation most
favourahh' to tin* preservation and improvement of culture.
1 htive suggf'sted in my first chapter that those among the

* Sci* a valuable article by Professor Evans-Pritchard on ‘Social
AnthrojK)lo(j;y’ in lilackfriars for November 1946. He remarks; ‘The
answer would scciri tu'ln' that the sociologist should also be a moral
philosojihcr and that, a-v .such, he should have a set of definite beliefs
and values in terms uf which he evaluates the facts he studies as a
sociologist.’

69

Unity and Diversity : Sect and Cult

‘higher religions’ which are most likely to continue to stimu-
late culture, are those which are capable of being accepted
by peoples of different cultures: those which have the
greatest universality— though potential universality by it-
self may be no criterion of a ‘higher religion’. Such religions
can provide a ground pattern of common belief and beha-
viour, upon which a variety of local patterns can be em-
broideredj and they will encomrage a reciprocal influence of
peoples upon each other, such that eny cultural progress in
one area may quicken development in another. In certain
historical conditions, a fierce exclusiveness may be a neces-
sary condition for the preservation of a culture: the Old
Testament bears witness to this.i In spite of this particular
historical situation, we should be able to agree that the
practice of a common religion, by peoples each having its
own cultural character , should usually promote the exchange
of influence to their reciprocal advantage. It is of course
conceivable that a religion may be too easily accommodated
to a variety of cultures, and become assimilated without
assimilating 5 and that this weakness may tend to bring
about the opposite result, if the religion breaks up into
branches or sects so opposed that they cease to influence
each other. Christianity and Buddhism have been exposed
to this danger.

From this point it is with Christianity alone that I am to
be concerned 5 in particular with the relation of Catholicism
and Protestantism in Europe and the diversity of sects within
Protestantism. We must try to start without any bias for, or
against, unity or reunion or the maintenance of the separate
corporate identity of religious denominations. We must take
note of whatever injury appears to have been done to Euro-
pean culture, and to the culture of any part of Europe, bj
division into sects. On the other hand, we must acknowledge

1 Since the diaspora, and the scattering of Jews amongst peoples hold
ing tlie Christian Faith, it may have been unfortunate both for thes
peoples and for the Jews themselves, that the culture-contact betwee:
them has had to be within those neutral zones of cidture in whic
religion could be ignored; and the effect may have been to strengthe
the illusion that there can be culture without religion.

70

Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult

that many of the most remarkable achievements of culture
have been made since the sixteenth century, in conditions of
disunity: and that some, indeed, as in nineteenth-century
France, appear after the religious foundations for culture
seem to have crumbled away. We cannot affirm that if the
religious unity of Europe had continued, these or equally
brilliant achievements would have been realised. Either
religious unity or religious division may coincide with
cultural efflorescence or cultural decay.

From this point of view, we may take a moderate satisfac-
tion, which should not be allowed to settle into complacency,
when we review the history of England. In a nation in
which no tendency to Protestantism appeared, or in which
it was negligible, there must always be a danger of religious
petrifaction, and of aggressive unbelief. In a nation in which
the relations of Church and State run too smoothly, it does
not matter much, from our present point of view, whether
the cause is ecclesiasticism, the dominance of State by
Church, or erastianism, the dominance of Church by State.
Indeed, it is not always easy to distinguish between the two
conditions. The effect equally may be, that every disaffected
person, and every sufferer from injustice, will attribute his
misfortunes to the inherent evil of the Church, or to an
inherent evil in Christianity itself. Formal obedience to the
Roman See is itself no assurance that, in a wholly Catholic
nation, religion and culture will not becoirie too closely
identified. Elements of local culture — even of local barbarism
— may become invested with the sanctity of religious obser-
vances, and superstition may flourish under the guise of
piety; a people may tend to slip back towards the unity of
religion and culture that pertains to primitive communities.
The result of the unquestioned dominance of one cult, when
a people is passive, may be torpor: when a people is quick
and self-assertive, the result may be chaos. For, as dis-
content turns to disaffection, the anti-clerical bias may be-
come an anti-religious tradition 5 a distinct and hostile cul-
ture grows and flourishes, and a nation is divided against
itself. The factions have to continue to live with each other;

71

Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult

and the common language and ways of life which they
retain, far from mollifying animosity, may only exasperate
it. The religious division becomes a symbol for a group of
associated differences, often rationally unrelated^ around
these differences swarm a host of private grievances, fears
and interests; and the contest for an indivisible heritage may
terminate only in exhaustion.

It would here be irrelevant to review those sanguinary
passages of civil strife, such as the Thirty Years War, in
which Catholics and Protestants fought over such an heri-
tage. Explicit theological contentions between Christians no
longer attract to themselves those other irreconcilable inter-
ests which seek a decision by arms. The deepest causes of
division may still be religious, but they become conscious,
not in theological but in political, social and economic doc-
trines. Certainly, in those countries in which the prevailing
faith has been Protestant, anti -clericalism seldom takes a
violent form. In such countries, both faith and infidelity
tend to be mild and inoffensive; as the culture has become
secularised, the cultural differences between faithful and
infidel are minimal; the boundary between belief and un-
belief is vague; the Christianity is more pliant, the atheism
more negative; and all parties live in amity, so long as they
continue to accept some common moral conventions.

The situation in England, however, differs from that in
other countries, whether Catholic or Protestant. In England,
as in other Protestant countries, atheism has been mostly of
a passive kind. No statistician could produce an estimate of
the numbers of Christians and non-Christians. Many people
live on an unmarked frontier enveloped in dense fog; and
those who dwell beyond it are more numerous in the dark
waste of ignorance and indifference, than in the well-lighted
desert of atheism. The English unbeliever, of some social
status however humble, is likely to conform to the practices
of Christianity on the occasions of birth, death and the first
venture in matrimony. Atheists in this country are not yet
culturally united: their types of atheism will vary according
to the culture of the religious communion in which they, or

72

Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult

their parents, or their grandparents were reared. The chief
cultural differences in England have, in the past, been those
between Anglicanism and the more important Protestant
sects; and even these differences are far from clearly defined:
first, because the Church of England itself has comprehended
wider variations of belief and cult than a foreign observer
would believe it possible for one institution to contain with-
out bursting; and second, because of the number and variety
of the sects separated from it.

If my contentions in the first chapter are accepted, it will
be agreed that the formation of a religion is also the forma-
tion of a culture. From this it should follow that, as a
religion divides into sects, and as these sects develop from
generation to generation, a variety of cultures will be pro-
pagated. And, as the intimacy of religion and culture is
such that we may expect what happens one way to happen
the other, we are prepared to find that the division between
Christian cultures will stimulate further differentiations of
belief and cult. It does not fall within my purpose to consider
the Great Schism between East and West which corresponds
to the shifting geographical boundary between two cultures.
When we consider the western world, we must recognise
that the main cultural tradition has been that corresponding
to the Church of Rome. Only within the last four hundred
years has any other manifested itself; and anyone with a
sense of centre and periphery must admit that the western
tradition has been Latin, and Latin means Rome. There are
countless testimonies of art and thought and manners; and
amonff these we must include the work of all men born and
educated in a Catholic society, whatever their individual
beliefs. B'rom this point of view, the separation of Northern
Europe, and of England in particular, from communion with
Rome represents a diversion from the main stream of cul-
ture. To pronounce, upon this separation, any judgment of
value, to assume that it was. a good or a bad thing, is what in
this inve.stigation we must try to avoid; for that would be to
pass from the sociological to the theological point of view.
And as I must at this point introduce the term sub-culture

73

Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult

to signify the culture which pertains to the area of a divided
part of Christendom, we must be careful not to assume that
a sub-culture is necessarily an inferior culture ^ remembering
also that while a sub-culture may suffer loss in being sepa-
rated from the main body, the main body may also be
mutilated by the loss of a member of itself.

We must recognise next, that where a sub-culture has in
time become established as the main culture of a particular
territory, it tends to change places, for that territory, with
the main European culture. In this respect it differs from
those sub-cultures representing sects the members of which
share a region with the main culture. In England, the main
cultural tradition has for several centuries been Anglican.
Roman Catholics in England are, of course, in a more central
European tradition than are Anglicans 5 yet, because the
main tradition of England has been Anglican, they are in
another aspect more outside of the tradition than are Protes-
tant dissenters. It is Protestant dissent which is, in relation
to Anglicanism, a congeries of sub-cultures; or, when we
regard Anglicanism itself as a sub-culture, we might refer
to it as a congeries of 'sub-sub-cultures’ — as this term is too
clownish to be admitted into good company, we can only say
‘secondary sub-cultures’. By Protestant dissent I mean those
bodies which recognise each other as ‘the Free Churches’,
together with the Society of Friends, which has an isolated
but distinguished history: all minor religious entities are
culturally negligible. The variations between the charters
of the chief religious bodies, have to some extent to do with
the peculiar circumstances of their origins, and the length
of the separation. It is of some interest that Congregation-
alism, which has a long history, numbers several distinguish-
ed theologians; whereas Methodism, with a briefer history,
and less theological justification for its separate existence,
appears to rely chiefly on its hymnology, and to need no
independent theological structure of its own. But whether
we consider a territorial sub-culture, or a secondary sub-
culture within a territory or scattered over several territories,
we may find ourselves led to the conclusion, that every sub-

74

Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult

culture is dependent upon that from which it is an offshoot.
The life of Protestantism depends upon the survival of that
against which it protests; and just as the culture of Protest-
ant dissent would perish of inanition without the persistence
of Anglican culture, so the maintenance of English culture
is contingent upon the health of the culture of Latin Europe,
and upon continuing to draw sustenance from that Latin
culture.

There is, however, a difference between the division of
Canterbury from Rome, and the division of Free Protestant-
ism from Canterbury, which is important for my purposes.
It corresponds to a difference presented in the previous chap-
ter, between colonisation by mass migration (as in the early
movements westwards across Europe) and colonisation by
certain elements separating themselves from a culture which
remains at home (as in the colonisation of the Dominions
and the Americas). The separation precipitated by Henry
VIII had the immediate cause of personal motives in high
quarters; it was reinforced by tendencies strong in England
and in Northern Europe, of more respectable origin. Once
released, the forces of Protestantism went further than
Henry himself intended or would have approved. But,
although the Reformation in England was, like any other
revolution, the work of a minority, and although it met with
several local movements of stubborn resistance, it eventually
carried with it the greater part of the nation irrespective of
class or region. The Protestant sects, on the other hand,
represent certain elements in English culture to the exclu-
sion of others: class and occupation played a large part in
their formation. It would probably be impossible for the
closest student to pronounce how far it is adherence to dis-
senting tenets that forms a sub-culture, and how far it is the
formation of a sub-culture that inspires the finding of reasons
for dissent. Tlie solution of that enigma is fortunately not
necessary for my purpose. The result, in any case, was a
stratification of England by sects, in some measure proceed-
ing from, in some measure aggravating, the cultural dis-
tinctions between classes.

75

Unity and Diversity : Sect and Cult

It might be possible for a profound student of ethnology
and of the history of early settlement in this island, to argue
the existence of causes of a more stubborn and more primi-
tive nature, for the tendencies to religious fission. He might
trace them to ineradicable differences between the culture
of the several tribes, races and languages which from time
to time held sway or contested for supremacy. He might,
furthermore, take the view that cultural mixture does not
necessarily follow the same course as biological mixture 5 and
that, even if we assumed every person of purely English
descent to have the blood of all the successive invaders
mingled in his veins in exactly the same proportions, it need
not follow that cultural fusion ensued. He might therefore
discover, in the tendency of various elements in the popula-
tion to express their faith in different ways, to prefer differ-
ent types of communal organisation and different styles of
worship, a reflection of early divisions between dominant
and subject races. Such speculations, which I am too un-
learned to support or oppose, lie outside of my scope; but it
is as well for both writer and readers to remind themselves
that there may be deeper levels than that upon which the
enquiry is being conducted. If differences persisting to the
present day could be established in descent from primitive
differences of culture, this would only reinforce the case for
the unity of religion and culture propounded in my first
chapter.

However this may be, there are curiosities enough to
occupy our attention in the mixture of motives and interests
in the dissensions of religious parties, within the period of
modern history. One need not be a cynic to be amused, or a
devotee to be saddeited, by the spectacle of the self-decep-
tion, as well as the frequent hypocrisy, of the attackers and
defenders of one or another form of the Christian faith. But
from the point of view of my essay, both mirth and sorrow
are irrelevant, because this confusion is just what one must
expect, being inherent in the human condition. There are,
certainly, situations in history in which a religious contest
can be attributed to a purely religious motive. The life-long

76

Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult

battle of St. Athanasius against the Arians and Eutychians
need not be regarded in any other light than the light of
theology: the scholar who endeavoured to demonstrate that
it represented a culture-clash between Alexandria and Anti-
och or some similar ingenuity, would appear to us at best
to be talking about something else. Even the purest theolo-
gical issue, tiowever, will in the long run have cultural con-
sequences: a superficial acquaintance with the career of
Athanasius sliould be enough to assure us that he was one of
the «rcat builders of western civilisation. And, for the most
art^ it is inevitable that we should, when we defend our
relio-ion, be defending at the same time our culture, and
vic<r versa: we are obeying the fundamental instinct to pre-
serve our existemce. And in so doing, in the course of time
we make many tn-rors and commit many crimes — most of
whicli may be sirnpliiied into the one error, of identifying
our religion and our culture on a level on which we ought
to distinguish tliem from each other.

Such considerations are relevant not only to the history of
religious strife and separation: they are equally pertinent
when we come to entertain schemes for reunion. The impor-
tance of slopping to examine cultural peculiarities, to dis-
entangle religions from cidtural hindrances, has hitherto
been overU)oked-'and I should say more than overlooked;
delib(‘rat(dy though uncon.sciously ignored— in the schemes
of reunion'betw('en (Ihrislian bodies adopted or put forward.
Hence the ajipearanc.e of disingenuousness, of agreement
upon formula.' to which the contracting parties can give
(liffert'nl inU'rpretations, which provokes a comparison with

treali.'s bet \v.'('n governments.

The r.‘a.ler unacpuiinted with the details of ‘oecumeni-
citv’ diould b.' reminded of the difference between inter-
communion and rruninn. An

nioii bel\v(M‘n two national churches— such as the Church o

England and the Church of Sweden-or ^ ®

Chmch of England and one of the Eastern ^^hes, o
belweeti the Chundi of England and a body such ^

Catholics’ fotmd in Holland and elsewhere on the Continent,

77

Unity and Diversity : Sect and Cult

does not necessarily look any further than what the term
implies; a reciprocal recognition of the ‘validity of orders’
and of the orthodoxy of tenets 5 with the consequence that
the members of each church can communicate, the priests
celebrate and preach, in the churches of the other country.
An agreement of inter-communion could only lead toward
reunion in one of two events: the unlikely event of a political
union of the two nations, or the ultimate event of a world-
wide reunion of Christians. Reunion, on the other hand,
means in effect either reunion of one or another body having
episcopal government, with the Church of Rome, or re-
union between bodies separated from each other in the same
areas. The movements towards reunion which are at the
present time most active, are of the second kind: reunion
between the Anglican Church and one or more of the ‘Free
Church’ bodies. It is with the cultural implications of this
latter kind of reunion that we are here specially concerned.
There can be no question of reunion between the Church of
England and, let us say, the Presbyterians or Methodists in
America; any reunion would be of American Presbyterians
with the Episcopal Church in America, and of English
Presbyterians with the Church of England.

It should be obvious, from the considerations advanced in
my first chapter, that complete reunion involves community
of culture — some common culture already existing, and the
potentiality of its further development consequent upon
official reunion. The ideal reunion of all Christians does not,
of course, imply an eventual uniform culture the world over;
it implies simply a ‘Christian ciilture’ of which all local
cultures should be variants — and they would and should
vary very widely indeed. We can already distinguish be-
tween a ‘local culture’ and a ‘European culture’; when we
use the latter term we recognise the local differences; simi-
larly a universal ‘Christian culture’ should not be taken to
ignore or override the differences between the cultures of
the several continents. But the existence of a strong commu-
nity of culture between various Christian bodies in the same
area (we must remember that we here mean ‘culture’ as

78

Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult

distinguished from ‘religion’) not only facilitates reunion of
Christians in that area, but exposes such reunion to peculiar
dangers.

I have put forward the view that every division of a Chris-
tian people into sects brings about or aggravates the develop-
ment of ‘sub-cultures’ amongst that people; and I have
asked tlie reader to examine Anglicanism and the Free
Churches for confirmation of this view. But it should now be
added, tliat the cultural division between Anglicans and
Free Churchmen liave, under changing social and economic
conditions, become attenuated. The organisation of rural
society frorxi which the Church of England drew much of its
cultural strengtli is in decay; the landed gentry have less
security, l(!ss power and less influence; the families which
have risen in trade and in many places succeeded to terri-
torial pro])rieU)rsiup are themselves progressively reduced
and impoverished. A diminishing number of Anglican clergy
come from f)ul)lic scliools or the old universities, or are edu-
cated at their families’ expense; bishops are not wealthy
men, and are embarrassed in keeping up palaces. Anglican
and Free Church laymen liave been educated at the same
universities and often at the same schools. And finally, they
are all exjiosed to the same environment of a culture severed
from religion. When men of different religious persuasions
are drawn togetlun- by common interests and common
anxicaiiis, by tlunr awareness of an increasingly oppressive
non-Cl iristian world, and by their unawareness of the extent
to which they arc; themselves penetrated by' non-Christian
infliumce.s and by a neutral culture, it is only to be expected
that the viistigcs of the distinctions between their several
Christian cultures should seem to them of minor significance.

With the dangers of reunion on erroneous or evasive
terms I am not here concerned; but I am much concerned
with the danger that reunion facilitated by the disappear-
ance of the cultural characteristics of the several bodies re-
united might accelerate and confirm the general lowering
of culture. The refinement or crudity of theological and
philosophical thinking is itself, of course, one of the measures

79

Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult

of the state of our culture^ and the tendency in some quarters
to reduce theology to such principles as a child can under-
stand or a Socinian accept, is itself indicative of cultural
debility. But there is a further danger, from our point of
view, in schemes of reunion which attempt to remove the
difficulties, and protect the self-assertiveness, of everybody.
In an age like our own, when it has become a point of polite-
ness to dissimulate social distinctions, and to pretend that
the highest degree of ‘culture’ ought to be made accessible
to everybody— in an age of cultural levelling, it will be
denied that the several Christian fragments to be re-united
represent any cultural differences. There is certain to be a
strong pressure towards a reunion on terms of complete
cultural equality. Too much account may even be taken
of the relative numbers of the membership of the uniting
bodies; for a main culture will remain a main culture,
and a sub-culture will remain a sub-culture, even if the
latter attracts more adherents than the former. It is
always the main religious body which is the guardian of
more of the remains of the higher developments of culture
preserved from a past time before the division took place.
Not only is it tlie main religious body which has the more
elaborated theology; it is the main religious body which is
the least alienated from the best intellectual and artistic
activity of its time. Hence it is that the convert — and I think
not only of conversion from one form of Christianity to
another, but indeed primarily of conversion from indiffer-
ence to Christian belief and practice — ^the convert of the
intellectual or sensitive type is drawn towards the more
Catholic type of worship and doctrine. This attraction, which
may occur before the prospective convert has begun to in-
form himself al)out Christianity at all, may be cited by the
outsider as evidence that the convert has become a Christian
for the wrong reasons, or that he is guilty of insincerity and
affectation, livery sin that can be imagined has been prac-
tised, and the pretence of religious faith may often enough
have cloaked intellectual or aesthetic vanity and self-indul-
gence; but, on the view of the intimacy of religion and cul-

80

Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult

ture which is the starting point of my examination, such
phenomena as the progress to religious faith through cultu-
ral attraction are both natural and acceptable.

After the considerations now reviewed, I must attempt to
link the chapter to the two preceding chapters, by enquiring
what is the ideal pattern of unity and diversity between
Christian nations and between the several strata in each
nation. It sliould be obvious that the sociological point of
view cannot lead us to those conclusions which can properly
be reached only by theological premisses 5 and the reader of
the previous chapters will be prepared to find no solution in
any rigid and unchangeable scheme. No security against
cultural deterioration is offered by any of the three chief
types of religious organisation: the international church
with a central government, the national church, or the

separated sect. The danger of freedom is deliquescence; the
danger of strict order is petrifaction. Nor can we judge from
the history of any particular society, whether a different
religious history would have resulted in a more healthy
culture to-day. The disastrous effects of armed religious
strife within a people, as in England in the seventeenth
century or in the German States in the sixteenth, need no
emphasis; the disintegrating effect of sectarian division has
already been touched upon. Yet we may ask whether
Methodism did not, in the period of its greatest fervour,
revive the spiritual life of the English, and prepare the way
for the Evangelical Movement and even for the Oxford
Movement, hurtherniore, Dissent made it possible for work-

ing class ’ Christians (tliough perhaps it might have done
more than it has for ‘labouring class’ Christians) to play that
part, which all zinilous and socially active Christians should
wish to play, in the conduct of their local church and the
social aiul charitable organisations connected with it.^ The
actual choice, at times, has been between sectarianism and
indifference'; and those who chose the former were, in so

‘ See two vtthmlile .Suppleincnts to The Christian News-Letter;
‘lu-ut.u-uical ChrisUanity and the Working Cksses by W. ^- Symons
July "^>0, I'l-H; and ‘The Free Cluirches and Working Class Culture by
John Marsh, May iiO, 1942.

81

E.D.C.

Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult

doing, keeping alive the culture of certain social strata. And,
as I have said at the beginning, the appropriate culture of
each stratum is of equal importance.

As in the relation between the social classes, and as in the
relation of the several regions of a country to each other and
to the central power, it would seem that a constant struggle
between the centripetal and the centrifugal forces is desi-
rable. For without the struggle no balance can be main-
tained j and if either force won the result would be deplorable.
The conclusions to which we are justified in coming, from
our premisses and from the sociologist’s point of view, appear
to me to be as follows. Christendom should be one; the form
of organisation, and the locus of powers in that unity is a
question upon which we cannot pronounce. But within that
unity there should be an endless conflict between ideas —
for it is only by the struggle against constantly appearing
false ideas that the truth is enlarged and clarified, and in the
conflict with heresy that orthodoxy is developed to meet the
needs of the time; an endless effort also on the part of each
region to shape its Cliristianity to suit itself, an effort which
should neither be wholly suppressed nor left wholly un-
checked. The local temperament must express its particu-
larity in its form of Christianity, and so must the social stra-
tum, so that the culture proper to each area and each class
may flourish; but there must also be a force holding these
areas and these classes together. If this corrective force in
the direction of uniformity of belief and practice is lacking,
then the culture of each part will suffer. We have already
found that the culture of a nation prospers with the pros-
perity of the culture of its several constituents, both geo-
graphical and social; but that it also needs to he itself a part
of a larger culture, which requires the ultimate ideal, how-
ever unrealisable, of a ‘world culture’ in a sense different
from that implicit in the schemes of world-federationists.
And without a common faith, all efforts towards drawing
nations closer together in culture can produce only an illusion
of unity.

82

CHAPTER V

A Note on Culture and Politics

Politics did not, however, so much engage him as to withhold his
thoughts from things of more importance.

SAMUEL JOHNSON On GEORGE LYTTELTON

We observe nowadays that ‘culture’ attracts the
attention of men of politics: not that politicians
are always ‘men of culture’, but that ‘culture’ is
recognised both as an instrument of policy, and as something
socially desirable which it is the business of the State to
promote. We not only hear, from high political quarters,
that ‘cultural relations’ between nations are of great impor-
tance, but find that bureaux are founded, and officials ap-
pointed, for the express purpose of attending to these rela-
tions, which are presumed to foster international amity. The
fact that culture has become, in some sense, a department
of politics, should not obscure in our memory the fact that
at other periods politics has been an activity pursued within
a culture, and between representatives of different cultures.
It is therefore not impertinent to attempt to indicate the
place of politics within a culture united and divided accord-
ing to the kind of unity and division which we have been
considering.

We may assume, I think, that in a society so articulated
the practice of politics and an active interest in public affairs
would not be the business of everybody, or of everybody to
the same degree^ and that not everybody should concern
himself, except at moments of crisis, with the conduct of the
nation as a whole. In a healthily regional society, public

85

A Note on Culture and Politics

affairs would be the business of everybody, or of the weat
majority, only within very small social units 5 and would be
the business of a progressively smaller number of men in
the larger units within which the smaller were compre-
hended. In a healthily stratified society, public affairs would
be a responsibility not equally borne: a greater responsibility
would be inherited by those who inherited special advan-
tages, and in whom self-interest, and interest for the sake of
their families (‘a stake in the country’) should cohere with
public spirit. 1 he goveining elite, of the nation as a whole,
would consist of those whose responsibility was inherited
with their affluence and position, and whose forces were
constantly increased and often led, by rising individuals of
exceptional talents. But when we speak of a governing dlite,
we must safeguard ourselves against thinking of an dlite
sharply divided from the other dlites of society.

The relation of the political dlite — by which we mean the
leading members of all the effective and recognised political
groups: for tlie survival of a parliamentary system requires
a constant dining with the Opposition^ — to the other dikes
would be put too crudely if described as communication
between men of action and men of thought. It is rather a
relation between men of different types of mind and differ-
ent areas of thought and action. A sharp distinction between
thought and action is no more tenable for the political than
for the religious life, in which the contemplative must have
his own activity, and the secular priest must not be wholly
unpractised in meditation. There is no plane of active life
on which thought is negligible, except that of the merest
automatic execution of orders 5 and there is no species of
thinking which can be quite without effect upon action.

I have suggested elsewhere® that a society is in danger of
disintegration when there is a lack of contact between people
of different areas of activity — ^between the political, the
scientific, the arti.stic, the philosophical and the religious

^ I sec*m to n*riri!embi»r that some such phrase was either attributed to
Sir William Vernon Ilarcourt, or used about him.

® Tht Idm «/a Chrktmn Smiety^ p. 40.

84

A Note on Culture and Politics

minds. This separation cannot be repaired merely by public
organisation. It is not a question of assembling into commit-
tees representatives of different types of knowledge and
experience, of calling in everybody to advise everybody else.
The dlite should be something different, something much
more organically composed, than a panel of bonzes, caciques
and tycoons. Men who meet only for definite serious pur-
poses, and on official occasions, do not wholly meet. They
may have some common concern very much at heart; they
may, in the course of repeated contacts, come to share a
vocabulary and an idiom which appear to communicate
every shade of meaning necessary for their common purpose;
but they will continue to retire from these encounters each
to his private social world as well as to his solitary world.
Everyone lias observed that the possibilities of contented
silence, of a mutual liappy awareness when engaged upon a
common task, or an underlying seriousness and significance
in the enjoyment of a silly joke, are characteristics of any
close personal intimacy; and the congeniality of any circle
of friends depends upon a common social convention, a
common ritual, and common pleasures of relaxation. These
aids to intimacy are no less important for the communica-
tion of meaning in words, than the possession of a common
subject upon which the several parties are informed. It is
unfortunate for a man when his friends and his business
associates arc two unrelated groups; it is also narrowing
when they are one and the same group.

Such obsi'rvations upon personal intimacy cannot pretend
to any novelty: the only possible novelty is in calling atten-
tion to tlumi in this context. They point to the desirability of
a society in which jicrsons of every superior activity can
meet without merely talking shop or being at pains to talk
each otlu'r’s shop. In order correctly to appraise a man of
action we must nuM't him: or we must at least have known
enough men of similar pursuits to be able to draw a shrewd
guess about one whom we have not met. And to meet a man
of thought, and to form an impression of his personality,
may be of great a.ssistance in judging his ideas. This is not

A Note on Culture und Politics

wholly improper even in the field of art, though ^Yith
important reservations, and though the impressions of an
artist’s personality often affect opinion of his work quite ir-
relevantly—for every artist must have remarked, that while
a small number of people dislike his work more strongly
after meeting him, there are also many who are more
friendly disposed towards his work if they find him a
pleasant fellow. These advantages persist however they may
offend the reason, and in spite of the fact that in modern
societies of large numbers, it is impossible for everyone to
know everyone else.

In our time, we read too many new books, or are oppressed
by the thought of the new books which we are neglecting to
readj we read many books, because we cannot know enough
people; we cannot know everybody whom it would be to our
benefit to know, because there are too many of them. Con-
sequently, if we have the skill to put words together and the
fortune to get them printed, we communicate by writing
more books. It is often those writers whom we are lucky
enough to know, whose books we can ignore; and the better
we know them personally, the less need we may feel to read
what they write. We are encumbered not only with too
many new books: we are further embarrassed by too many
periodicals, reports and privately circulated memoranda. In
the endeavour to keep up with the most intelligent of these
publications we may sacrifice the three permanent reasons
for reading: the acquisition of wisdom, the enjoyment of art,
and the pleasure of entertainment. Meanwhile, the profes-
sional politician has too much to do to have leisure for serious
reading, even on politics. He has far too little time for ex-
change of ideas and information with men of distinction in
other walks of life. In a society of smaller size (a society,
therefore, which was less feverishly busy) there might be
more conversation and fewer books; and we should not find
the tendency — of which this essay provides one example—
for those who have acquired some reputation, to write
books outside the subject on which they have made that
reputation.

86

A Note on Culture and Politics

It is u.nli]c6ly ^ in fill tiic ttifiss of lottorprosSj th&t tli6 pro-
foundest find most original works will reach the eye or com-
mand the attention of a large public, or even of a good
number of the readers who are qualified to appreciate them.
The ideas which flatter a current tendency or emotional
attitude will go farthest^ and some others will be distorted
to fit in with what is already accepted. The residuum in the
public mind is hardly likely to be a distillation of the best
and wisest: it is more likely to represent the common preju-
dices of the majoi ity of editors and reviewers. In this way
are formed the id6es regues— more precisely the mots regus
—which, because of their emotional influence upon that
part of tlie public which is influenced by printed matter,
have to be t akem into account by the professional politician,
and treated witli respect in his public utterances. It is un-
necessary, for the simultaneous reception of these ‘ideas’,
that they should be consistent among themselves; and, how-
ever they contradict each other, the practical politician must
handle them witli as much deference as if they were the
constructions of informed sagacity, the intuitions of genius,
or the accumulated wisdom of ages. He has not, as a rule,
inhaled any fragrance they may have had when they were
fresh; he only noses tliern when they have already begun to
stink.

In a society so graded as to have several levels of culture,
and several levels of power and authority, the politician
might at least In*' restrained, in his use of language, by his
respect for the judgment, and fear of the ridicule, of a
smaller and mores critical public, among which was main-
tained some standard of prose style. If it were also a de-
centralised .soci(sty, a society in which local cultures con-
tinued to flourish, and in which the majority of problems
wer(' local problents on which local populations could form
an opinion from their own experience and from conversa-
tion with their neighbours, political utterances might also
tend to munifost greater clarity and be susceptible of fewer
variations of interj)retation. A local speech on a local issue is
likely to he more intelligible than one addressed to a whole

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A Note on Culture and Politics

nation, and we observe that the greatest muster of
ambiguities and obscure generalities is usually to be found
in speeches which are addressed to the whole world

It is always desirable that a part of the education of those
persons who are either born into, or qualified by their abili-
ties to enter, the superior political grades of society, should
be instruction in history, and that a part of the study of
history should be the history of political theory. The
advantage of the study of Greek history and Greek political
theory, as a preliminary to the study of other history and
other theory, is its manageability, it has to do with a small
area, with men rather than masses, and with the human
passions of individuals rather than with those vast im-
personal forces which in onr modern society are a necessary
convenience of thought, and the study of which tends to
obscure the study of human beings. The reader of Greek
philosophy, moreover, is unlikely to be over-sanguine about
the effects of political theory 5 for he will observe that the
study of political forms appears to have arisen out of the
failure of political systems ^ and that neither Plato nor Aristotle
was much concerned with prediction, or very optimistic
about the future.

The kind of political theory which has arisen in quite
modern times is less concerned with human nature, which
it is inclined to treat as something which can always be
re -fashioned to fit whatever political form is regarded as
most desirable. Its real data are impersonal forces which
may have originated in the conflict and combination
of human wills but have come to supersede them. As a part
of academic discipline for the young, it suffers from several
drawbacks. It tends, of course, to form minds which will be
set to think only in terms of impersonal and inhuman forces,
and thereby to de-humanise its students. Being occupied
with humanity only in the mass, it tends to separate itself
from ethics^ being occupied only with that recent period of
history during which humanity can most easily be shown to
have been ruled by impersonal forces, it reduces the proper
study of mankind to the last two or three hundred years of

88

A Note on Culture and Politics

man. It too often inculcates a belief in a future inflexibly
determined and at the same time in a future which we are
wholly free to shape as we like. Modern political thought,
inextricably involved with economics and with sociology’
preempts to itself the position of queen of the sciences. For the
exact and experimental sciences are judged according to their

utility, and are valued in so far as they produce results

either for making life more comfortable and less laborious,
or for making it more precarious and ending it more quickly.
Culture itself is regarded either as a negligible by-product
which can be left to itself, or as a department of life to be
organised in accordance with the particular schemewe favour.
I am thinking not only of the more dogmatic and totalitarian
philosophies of the present day, but of assumptions which
colour thinking in every country and tend to be shared by
the most opposed parties.

An important document in the history of the political
direction of culture will be Leon Trotsky’s essay, Literature
and Revolution, of which an English translation appeared in
1925.1 Xhe conviction, which seems to be deeply implanted
in the Muscovite mind, that it is the role of Mother Russia
to contribute not merely ideas and political forms, but a total
way of life for the rest of the world, has gone far to make us
all more politically culture-conscious. But there have been
other causes than the Russian Revolution for this conscious-
ness. The researches and the theories of anthropologists have
played their part, and have led us to study the relations of
imperial powers and subject peoples with a new attention.
Governments are more aware of the necessity of taking
account of cultural differences 5 and to the degree to which
colonial administration is controlled from the imperial

^ PublivShed by International Publishers, New York. A book which
merits repxiblication. It does not give the impression that Trotsky was
very sensitive to literature; but he was, from his own point of view, very
intelligent about it. Like all his writings, the book is encumbered with
discussion of minor Russian personalities of which the foreigner is
ignorant and in which he is not interested; but this indulgence in detail,
while it contributes a flavour of provinciality, gives the work all the
more appearance of genuineness, as having been written rather to speak
his mind than with an eye to a foreign audience.

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A Note on Culture and Politics

centre, these differences become of increasing importance.
One people in isolation is not aware of having a ‘culture’ at
all.^ And the differences between the several European
nations in the past were not wide enough to make their
peoples see their cultures as different to the point of conflict
and incompatibilityz culture-consciousness as a means of
uniting a nation against other nations was first exploited by
the late rulers of Germany. To-day, we have become culture-
conscious in a way which nourishes nazism, communism
and nationalism all at once 5 in a way which emphasises
separation without helping us to overcome it. At this point
a few remarks on the cultural effects of empire (in the most
comprehensive sense) may not be amiss.

The early British rulers of India were content to rule;
some of them, through long residence and continuous ab-
sence from Britain, assimilated themselves to the mentality
of the people they governed. A later type of rulers, explicitly
and increasingly the servants of Whitehall, and serving
only for a limited period (after which they returned to their
native country, either to retirement or to some other acti-
vity) aimed rather to bring to India the benefits of western
civilisation. They did not intend to uproot, or to impose, a
total ‘culture’: but the superiority of western political and
social organisation, of English education, of English justice,
of western ‘enlightenment’ and science seemed to them so
self-evident that the desire to do good would alone have
been a sufficient motive for introducing these things. The
Briton, unconscious of the importance of religion in the
formation of his own culture, could hardly be expected to
recognise its importance in the preservation of another. In
the piece-meal imposition of a foreign culture — an imposi-
tion in which force plays only a small part: the appeal to
ambition, and the temptation to which the native is exposed,
to admire the wrong things in western civilisation, euid for
the wrong reasons, are much more decisive — ^the motives of
arrogance and generosity are always inextricably mixed 5
there is at the same time an assertion of superiority and a
desire to communicate the way of life upon which that

90

A Note on Culture and Politics

assumed superiority is based^ so that the native acquires a
taste for western ways, a jealous admiration of material
power, and a resentment against his tutors. The partial
success of westernisation, of which some members of an
Eastern society are quick to seize the apparent advantages,
has tended to make the Oriental more discontented with his
own civilisation and more resentful of that which has caused
this discontent; has made him more conscious of differences,
at the same time that it has obliterated some of these differ-
ences; and has broken up the native culture on its highest
level, without penetrating the mass. And we are left with
the melancholy reflection that the cause of this disintegra-
tion is not corruption, brutality or maladministration: such
ills have played but a small part, and no ruling nation has
had less to be ashamed of than Britain in these particulars;
corruption, brutality and maladministration were too preva-
lent in India before the British arrived, for commission of
them to disturb the fabric of Indian life. The cause lies in
the fact that there can be no permanent compromise be-
tween the extremes of an external rule which is content to
keep order and leave the social structure unaltered, and a
complete cultural assimilation. The failure to arrive at the
latter is a religious failure.^

To point to the damage that has been done to native cul-
tures in the process of imperial expansion is by no means an
indictment of empire itself, as the advocates of imperial dis-
solution are only too apt to infer. Indeed, it is often these
same anti-imperialists who, being liberals, are the most

’ All interesting survey of the effects of culture-contact in the East is
to be fouiitl in The British in Asia by Guy Wint. Mr. Wint’s occasional
suggestions of the effect of India upon the British are no less suggestive
than his account of the effect of the British upon India. For example:

‘How the English colour prejudice began — ^whether it was inherited
from the Portuguese in India, or was an infection from the Hindu caste
system or, as has been suggested, began with the arrival of insular and
suburban wives of civil servants, or came from some other cause — -is not
certain. The British in India were the British middle class living in the
artificial condition of having above them no upper class of their own
people, and below them no lower class of their own people. It was a state
of existence which led to a combined arrogance and defensiveness.’
P.209.

91

A Note on Culture and Politics

complacent believers in the superiority of Western civilisa-
tion, and at one and the same time blind to the benefits
conferred by imperial government and to the injury done
by the destruction of native culture. According to such
enthusiasts, we do well to intrude ourselves upon another
civilisation, equip the members of it with our mechanical
contrivances, our systems of government, education, law,
medicine and finance, inspire them with a contempt for
their own customs and with an enlightened attitude towards
religious superstition — and then leave them to stew in the
broth which we have brewed for them.

It is noticeable that the most vehement criticism, or abuse,
of British imperialism often comes from representatives of
societies which practise a different form of imperialism —
that is to say, of expansion which brings material benefits
and extends the influence of culture. America has tended to
impose its way of life chiefly in the course of doing business,
and creating a taste for its commodities. Even the humblest
material artefact, which is the product and the symbol of a
particular civilisation, is an emissary of the culture out of
which it comes: to particularise only by mentioning that
influential and inflammable article the celluloid film; and
thus American economic expansion may be also, in its way,
the cause of disintegration of cultures which it touches.

The newest type of imperialism, that of Russia, is pro-
bably the most ingenious, and the best calculated to flourish
according to the temper of the present age. The Russian
Empire appears to be sedulous to avoid the weaknesses of
the empires which have preceded it: it is at the same
time more ruthless and more careful of the vanity of subject
peoples. The official doctrine is one of complete racial
equality — an appearance easier for Russia to preserve in
Asia, because of the oriental cast of the Russian mind and
■Kpffluse of the backwardness of Russian development accord-
1 western standards. Attempts appear to be made to
> the similitude of local self-government and auto-
1 aim, I suspect, is to give the several local republics
ite states the illusion of a kind of independence,
92

A Note on Culture and Politics

while the real power is exercised from Moscow. The illusion
must sometimes fade, when a local republic is suddenly and
ignominiously reduced to the status of a kind of province or
crown colony^ but it is maintained— and this is what is most
interesting from our point of view — by a careful fostering of
local ‘culture’, culture in the reduced sense of the word, as
everything that is picturesque, harmless and separable from
politics, such as language and literature, local arts and cus-
toms. But as Soviet Russia must maintain the subordination
of culture to political theory, the success of her imperialism
seems likely to lead to a sense of superiority on the part of
that one of her peoples in which her political theory has
been formed^ so that we might expect, so long as the Russian
Empire holds together, to find the increasing assertion of one
dominant Muscovite culture, with subordinate races survi-
ving, not as peoples each with its own cultural pattern, but
as inferior castes. However that may be, the Russians have
been the first modern people to practise the political direc-
tion of culture consciously, and to attack at every point the
culture of any people whom they wish to dominate. The
more highly developed is any alien culture, the more
thorough the attempts to extirpate it by elimination of
those elements in the subject population in which that cul-
ture is most conscious.

The dangers arising from ‘culture-consciousness’ in the
West are at present of a different kind. Our motives, in
attempting to do something about our culture, are not yet
consciously political. They arise from the consciousness that
our culture is not in very good health and from the feeling
that we must take steps to improve its condition. This con-
sciousness has transformed the problem of education, bv
either identifying culture with education, or turni
education as the one instrument for improving our i'

As for the intervention of the State, or of some quas:
body subventioned by the State, in assistance of the
sciences, we can see only too well the need, under
conditions, for such support. A body like the British >
by constantly sending representatives of the arts and

95

A Note on Culture and Politics

abroad, and inviting foreign representatives to this countrj',
is in our time invaluable — ^but we must not come to accept
as permanent or normal and healthy the conditions which
make such direction necessary. We are prepared to believe
that there will, under any conditions, be useful work for the
British Council to perform 5 but we should not like to be
assured that never again will it be possible for the intellec-
tual dlite of all countries to travel as private citizens and
make each other’s acquaintance without the approval and
support of some official organisation. Some important activi-
ties, it is likely enough, will never again be possible without
official backing of some kind. The progress of the experi-
mental sciences now requires vast and expensive equipment^
and the practice of the arts has no longer, on any large scale,
the benefit of private patronage. Some safeguard may be
provided, against increasing centralisation of control and
politicisation of the arts and sciences, by encoxiraging local
initiative and responsibility; and, as far as possible, separating
the central source of funds from control over their use. We
should do well also, to refer to the subsidised and artificially
stimulated activities each by its name: let us do what is
necessary for painting and sculpture, or architecture, or the
theatre, or music, or one or another science or department
of intellectual exercise, speaking of each by its name, and
restraining ourselves from using the word ‘culture’ as a
comprehensive term. For thus we slip into the assumption
that culture can be planned. Culture can never be wholly
conscious— there is always more to it than we are conscmus
of; and it cannot be planned because it is also the unconscious
background of all our planning.

94

CHAPTER VI

Notes on Education and Culture:
and Conclusion

During the recent war an exceptional number of
books were published on the subject of education;
there were also voluminous reports of commissions,
and an incalculable number of contributions on this subject in
periodicals. It is not my business, nor is it within my com-
petence, to review the whole of current educational theory;
but a few comments on it are in place, because of the close
association, in many minds, between education and culture.
What is of interest to my thesis is the kind of assumption
which is made by those who write about education. The
notes which follow comment on a few such prevalent
assumptions.

1 . That, before entering upon any discussion of Education,
the purpose of Education must be stated.

This is a very different thing from defining the word
‘education’. The Oxford Dictionary tells us that education
is ‘the process of bringing up (young persons)’; that it is ‘the
systematic instruction, schooling or training given to the
young (and, by extension, to adults) in preparation for the
work of life’; that it is also ‘culture or development of
powers, form£;tion of character’. We learn that the first of
these definitions is according to the use of the sixteenth cen-
tury; and that the third use appears to have arisen in the
nineteenth. In short, the dictionary tells you what you
know already, and I do not see how a dictionary could do
more. But when writers attempt to state the purpose oi

95

Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

education, they are doing one of two things; they are eliciting
what they believe to have been the unconscious purpose
always, and thereby giving their own meaning to the history
of the subject; or they are formulating what may not have
been, or may have been only fitfully, the real purpose in the
past, but should in their opinion be the purpose directing
development in the future. Let us look at a few of these
statements of the ptxrpose of education. In The Churches
Survey Their Task, a volume published in connexion with
the Oxford Conference on Church, Community and State
in 1957, we find the following:

Education is the process by which the community seeks to open its
life to all the individuals within it and enable them to take their part
in it. It attempts to pass on to them its culture, including the standards
by which it would have them live. Where that culture is regarded as
final, the attempt is made to impose it on younger minds. Where it is
viewed as a stage in development, younger minds are trained both to
receive it and to criticise and improve upon it.

This culture is composed of various elements. It runs from rudimen-
tary skill and knowledge up to the interpretation of the universe and
of man by which the community lives . . .

The purpose of education, it seems, is to transmit culture: so
culture (which has not been defined) is likely to be limited
to what can be transmitted by education. While ‘education’
is perhaps allowed to be more comprehensive than ‘the
educational system’, we must observe that the assumption
that culture can be summed up as skills and interpretations
controverts the more comprehensive view of culture which
I have endeavoured to take. Incidentally, we should keep a
sharp eye on this personified ‘community’ which is the
repository of authority.

Another account of the purpose of education is that which
sees it in terms of political and social change. This, if I have
understood him, is the purpose which fires Mr. H. C. Dent.
‘Our ideal’, he says in ^ New Order in English Education,
‘is a full democracy.’ Full democracy is not defined; and, if
full democracy is attained, we should like to know what is
to be our next ideal for education after this ideal has been
realised.

96

Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

Mr. Herbert Read gives his account of the purpose of
education in Education Through Art. I do not think that
Mr. Read could see quite eye to eye with Mr. Dent, for
whereas Mr. Dent wants a ‘full democracy’, Mr. Read says
that he ‘elects for a libertarian conception of democracy’,
which I suspect is a very different democracy from Mr.
Dent’s. Mr. Read (in spite of elects for) is a good deal more
precise in his use of words than Mr. Dent; so, while he is
less likely to confuse the hasty reader, he is more likely to
confound the diligent one. It is in electing for a libertarian
conception of democracy, he says, that we answer the
question ‘what is the purpose of education?’ This purpose
is further defined as ‘the reconciliation of individual unique-
ness with social unity’.

Another kind of account of the purpose of education is
the uncompleted account, of which Dr. F. C. Happold (in
Towards a New Aristocracy) gives us a specimen. The
fundamental task of education, he tells us, is ‘training the
sort of men and women the age needs’. If we believe that
there are some sorts of men and women which are needed
by every age, we may remark that there should be perma-
nence as well as change in education. But the account is
incomplete, in that we are left wondering who is to deter-
mine what are the needs of the age.

One of the most frequent answers to the question ‘what is
the purpose of education?’ is ‘happiness’. Mr. Herbert Read
gives us this answer too, in a pamphlet called The Education
of Free Men, by saying that he knows of no better definition
of the aims of education than that of William Godwin: ‘the
true object of education ... is the generation of happiness.’
‘The Government’s purpose’, said the White Paper which
heralded the latest Education Act, ‘is to secure for children
a happier childhood and a better start in life.’ Happiness is
often associated with ‘the full development of personality’.

Dr. C. E. M. load, showing more prudence than most of
those who attempt to answer this question, holds the view,
which seems to me a very sensible one, that education has a
number of ends. Of these he lists three (in About Education,

o 97 E-D-C.

Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

one of the most readable books on the subject that I have
consulted):

1 . To enable a boy or girl to earn his or her hving. . . .

2. To equip him to play his part as the citizen of a democracy.

3. To enable him to develop all the latent powers and faculties of
his nature and so enjoy a good life.

It is a relief, at this point, to have presented to us the simple
and intelligible notion that equipment to earn one’s living
is one of the purposes of education. We again note the close
association between education and democracy; here also Dr.
load is perhaps more prudent than Mr. Dent or Mr. Read
in not qualifying his ‘democracy’ by an adjective. ‘To
develop all the latent powers and faculties’ appears to be a
variant of ‘the full development of personality’; but Dr.
load is sagacious in avoiding the use of that puzzling word
‘personality’.

Some, no doubt, will disagree with Dr. load’s selection of
purposes. And we may, with more reason, complain that
none of them takes us very far without getting us into
trouble. They all contain some truth: but as each of them
needs to be corrected by the others, it is possible that they
all need to be adjusted to other purposes as well. Each of
them needs some qualification. A particular course of educa-
tion may, in the world in which a young person finds him-
self, be exactly what is needed to develop his pecuhar gifts
and yet impair his ability to earn a living. Education of the
young to play their part in a democracy is a necessary adapta-
tion of individual to environment, if a democracy is what he
is going to play his part in: if not, it is making the pupil
instrumental to the accomplishment of a social change which
the educator has at heart — and this is not education but
something else. I am not denying that a democracy is the
best form of society, but by introducing this standard for
education. Dr. load, with other writers, is leaving it opento
those who believe in some other form of society which Dr.
load might not like, to substitute (and so far as he is talking
about education only, Dr. Joad could not confute him) some
account like the following: ‘One of the purposes of education

98

Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

is to equip a boy or girl to play his or her part as the subject
of a despotic government.’ Finally, as for developing all the
latent powers and faculties of one’s nature, I am not sure
that anyone should hope for that; it may be that we can
only develop some powers and faculties at the expense of
others, and that there must be some choice, as well as inevi-
tably some accident, in the direction which anyone’s develop-
ment takes. And as for the good life, there is some ambiguity
in the sense in which we shall ‘enjoy’ it; and what the good
life is, has been a subject of discussion from early times to
the present day.

What we remark especially about the educational thought
of the last few years, is the enthusiasm with which education
has been taken up as an instrument for the realisation of
social ideals. It would be a pity if we overlooked the possi-
bilities of education as a means of acquiring wisdom-, if we
belittled the acquisition of knowledge for the satisfaction of
curiosity, without any further motive than the desire to
know; and if we lost our respect for learning. So much for
the purpose of education. I proceed to the next assumption.

2. That Education makes people happier.

We have already found that the purpose of education has
been defined as the making people happier. The assumption
that it does make people happier needs to be considered
separately. That the educated person is happier than the im-
educated is by no means self-evident. Those who are con-
scious of their lack of education are discontented, if they
cherish ambitions to excel in occupations for which they are
not qualified; they are sometimes discontented, simply be-
cause they have been given to understand that more educa-
tion would have made them happier. Many of us feel some
grievance against our elders, our schools or our imiversities
for not having done better by us: this can be a way of
extenuating our own shortcomings and excusing our failures.
On the other hand, to be educated above the level of those
whose social habits and tastes one has inherited, may cause a
division within a man which interferes with happiness; even

Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

though, ^ when the individual is of superior intellect, it may
bring him a fuller and more useful life. And to be trained,
taught or instructed above the level of one’s abilities and
strength may be disastrous 5 for education is a strain, and can
impose greater burdens upon a mind than that mind can
bear. Too much education, like too little education, can pro-
duce unhappiness.

3. That Education is something that everyone wants.

^ People can be persuaded to desire almost anything, for a
time, if they are constantly told that it is something to which
they are entitled and which is unjustly withheld from them.
The spontaneous desire for education is greater in some
communities than in others; it is generally agreed to be
stronger in the North than in the South of England, and
stronger still in Scotland. It is possible that the desire for
education is greater where there are difficulties in the way
of obtaining it — difficulties not insuperable but only to be
surmounted at the cost of some sacrifice and privation. If
this is so, we may conjecture that facility of education will
lead to indifference to it; and that the universal imposition
of education up to the years of maturity will lead to hostility
towards it. A high average of general education is perhaps
less necessary for a civil society than is a respect for learning.

4. That Education should be organised so as to give
‘equality of opportunity’ ?■

It follows from what has been said in an earlier chapter
about classes and dlites, that education should help to pre-
serve the class and to select the dlite. It is right that the
exceptional individual should have the opportxmity to ele-

^ This may be called Jacobinism in Education. Jacobinism, according
to one who had given some attention to it, consisted ‘in taking the

Sle as equal individuals, without any corporate name or description,
out attention to property, without division of powers, and forming
the government of delegates from a number of men, so constituted; in
destroying or confiscating property, and bribing the public creditors, or
the poor, with the spoils, now of one part of the community, now of
another, without regard to prescription or profession.’ — ^Burke: Remarks
on the Policy' of the Allies,

100

Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

vate himself in the social scale and attain a position in which
he can exercise his talents to the greatest benefit of him-
self and of society. But the ideal of an educational system
which would automatically sort out everyone according to
his native capacities is unattainable in practice 5 and if we
made it our chief aim, would disorganise society and debase
education. It would disorganise society, by substituting for
classes, dlites of brains, or perhaps only of sharp wits. Any
educational system aiming at a complete adjustment be-
tween education and society will tend both to restrict educa-
tion to what will lead to success in the world, and to restrict
success in the world to those persons who have been good
pupils of the system. The prospea of a society ruled and
directed only by those who have passed certain examinations
or satisfied tests devised by psychologists is not reassuring:
while it might give scope to talents hitherto obscured, it
would probably obscure others, and reduce to impotence
some who should have rendered high service. Furthermore,
the ideal of a uniform system such that no one capable of
receiving higher education could fail to get it, leads im-
perceptibly to the education of too many people, and con-
sequently to the lowering of standards to whatever this
swollen number of candidates is able to reach.

Nothing is more moving in Dr. load’s treatise than the
passage in which he expatiates on the amenities of Win-
chester and Oxford. Dr. load paid a visit to Winchester; and
while there, he wandered into a delightful garden. One sus-
pects that he may have got into the garden of the Deanery,
but he does not know what garden it was. This garden set
him to ruminating about the College, and its ‘blend of the
works of nature and man’. ‘What I see,’ he said to himself,
‘is the end-pi’oduct of a long-continuing tradition, running
back through our history, in this particular case, to the
Tudors.’ (I cannot see why he stopped at the Tudors, but
that was far enough to sustain the emotion with which his
mind was suffused.) It was not only nature and architec-
ture that impressed him; he was aware also of ‘a long tradi-
tion of secure men leading dignified and leisured lives’.

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Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

From Winchester his mind passed to Oxford, to the Oxford
which he had known as an undergraduate 3 and again, it was
not merely architecture and gardens upon which his mind
dwelt, but also men:

But even in my own time . . . when democracy was already knocking
at the gates of the citadel it was so soon to capture, some faint after-
math of the Greek sunset could be observed. At Balliol, in 1911 there
was a group of young men centring upon the Grenfells and John
Manners, many of whom were killed in the last war, who took it for
granted that they should row in the College boat, play hockey or rugger
for the College or even for the University, act for the O.U.D.S., get
tight at College Gaudies , spend part of the night talking in the company of
their friends, while at the same time getting their scholarships and prizes
and Firsts in Greats. The First in Greats was taken, as it were, in their
stride. I have not seen such men before or since. It may be that they
were the last representatives of a tradition which died with them. . . .

It seems strange, after these wistful reflections, that Dr.
load should end his chapter by supporting a proposal of Mr.
R. H. Tawney: that the public schools should be taken over
by the State and used as boarding schools to accommodate
for two or three years the intellectually abler secondary
school boys from the ages of sixteen to eighteen. For the
conditions over which he pronounces such a tearful valedic-
tory were not brought about by equality of opportunity.
They were not brought about, either, by mere privilege 5
but by a happy combination of privilege and opportunity,
in the blend he so savours, of which no Education Act will
ever find the secret.

5. The Mute Inglorious Milton dogma.

The Equality of Opportunity dogma, which is associated
with the belief that superiority is always superiority of
intellect, that some infallible method can be designed for
the detection of intellect, and that a system can be devised
which will infallibly nourish it, derives emotional reinforce-
ment from the belief in the mute inglorious Milton. This
myth assumes that a great deal of first-rate ability— not
merely ability, but genius — ^is being wasted for lack of
educationj or, alternatively, that if even one potential

102

Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

Milton has been suppressed in the course of centuries, from
deprivation of formal teaching, it is still worth while to turn
education topsy-turvy so that it may not happen again. (It
might be embarrassing to have a great many Miltons and
Shakespeares, but that danger is remote.) In justice to
Thomas Gray, we should remind ourselves of the last and
finest line of the quatrain, and remember that we may also
have escaped some Cromwell guilty of his country’s blood.
The proposition that we have lost a number of Miltons and
Cromwells through our tardiness in providing a comprehen-
sive state .system of education, cannot be either proved or
disproved: it has a strong attraction for many ardent reform-
ing spirits.

Tins completes my brief list — ^whichis not intended to be
exhaustive -of current beliefs. The dogma of equal oppor-
tunity is the most influential of all, and is maintained stoutly
by some who would shrink from what seem to me its prob-
able consequences. It is an ideal which can only be fully
realised wlien the institution of the family is no longer
respected, and when parental control and responsibility
passes to tlte State. Any .system which puts it into effect must
see that no advantages of family fortune, no advantages due
to the foresight, the self-sacrifice or the ambition of parents
are allowed to obtain for any child or young person an educa-
tion superior to that to which the system finds him to be
entitled. The popularity of the belief is perhaps an indica-
tion that the depression of the family is accepted, and that
the disintegration of cla.sses is far advanced. This disintegra-
tioii of Glass(‘.s had already led to an exaggerated estimate of
llui social imj)ortance of the right school and the right
coll(‘ge at the right university, as giving a status which
formerly [)ertained to mere birth. In a more articulated
society- -which is not a society in which social classes are
isolat(>d from (^ach other: that is itself a kind of decay — ^the
.social distinction of the right school or college would not be
so covel<;d, for social position would be marked in other
ways. T'he envy of those who are ‘better born’ than oneseK

105

Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

is a feeble velleity, with only a shadow of the passion with
which material advantages are envied. No sane person can
be consumed with bitterness at not having had more exalted
ancestors, for that would be to wish to he another person than
the person one is: but the advantage of the status conferred
by education at a more fashionable school is one which we
can readily imagine ourselves as having enjoyed also. The dis-
integration of class has induced the expansion of envy, which
provides ample fuel for the flame of ‘equal opportimity’.

Besides the motive of giving everyone as much education
as possible, because education is in itself desirable, there are
other motives affecting educational legislation: motives
which may be praiseworthy, or which simply recognise the
inevitable, and which we need mention here only as a
reminder of the complexity of the legislative problem. One
motive, for instance, for raising the age-limit of compulsory
schooling, is the laudable desire to protect the adolescent,
and fortify him against the more degrading influences to
which he is exposed on entering the ranks of industry. We
should be candid about such a motive; and instead of affirm-
ing what is to be doubted, that everyone will profit by as
many years of tuition as we can give him, admit that the
conditions of life in modern industrial society are so deplo-
rable, and the moral restraints so weak, that we must pro-
long the schooling of young people simply because we are at
our wits’ end to know what to do to save them. Instead of
congratulating ourselves on our progress, whenever the
school assumes another responsibility hitherto left to parents,
we might do better to admit that we have arrived at a stage
of civilisation at which the family is irresponsible, or in-
competent, or helpless; at which parents cannot be ex-
pected to train their children properly; at which many
parents cannot afford to feed them properly, and would
not know how, even if they had the means; and that
Education must step in and make the best of a bad job.^

1 I hope, however, that the reader of these lines has read, or will
immediately read, The Peckham Experiment, as an illustration of what
can he done, under modern conditions, to help the family to help itself.

104

Notes on Education and Culture; and Conclusion

Mr. D. R. Hardman^ observed that;

The age of industrialism and democracy had brought to an end
most of the great cultural traditions of Europe, and not least that of
architecture. In the contemporary world, in which the majority were
half-educated and many not even a quarter educated, and in which
large fortunes and enormous power could be obtained by exploiting
ignorance and appetite, there was a vast cultural breakdown which
stretched from America to Europe and from Europe to the East.

This is true, though there are a few inferences which might
be improperly drawn. The exploitation of ignorance and
appetite is not an activity only of commercial adventurers
making large fortunes: it can be pursued more thoroughly
and on a larger scale by governments. The cultural break-
down is not a kind of infection which began in America,
spread to Europe, and from Europe has contaminated the
East; (Mr. Hardman may not have meant that, but his
words might be so interpreted). But what is important is to
remember that ‘half-education’ is a modern phenomenon.
In earlier ages the majority could not be said to have been
‘half-educated’ or less: people had the education necessary
for the functions they were called upon to perform. It would
be incorrect to refer to a member of a primitive society, or
to a skilled agricultural labourer in any age, as half-educated
or quarter-educated or educated to any smaller fraction.
Education in the modern sense implies a disintegrated soci-
ety, in which it has come to be assumed that there must be
one measure of education according to which everyone is
educated simply more or less. Hence Education has become
an abstraction.

Once we have arrived at this abstraction, remote from
life, it is easy to proceed to the conclusion — for we all agree
about the ‘cultural breakdown’ — that education for every-
body is the means we must employ for putting civilisation
together again. Now so long as we mean by ‘education’
everything that goes to form the good individual in a good

1 As Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education, spe^ng
on January 12, 1946, at the general meeting of the Middlesex Head
Teachers’ Association.

105

Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

society, we are in accord, though the conclusion does not
appear to get us anywhere^ but when we come to mean by
‘education’ that limited system of instruction which the
Ministry of Education controls, or aims to control, the
remedy is manifestly and ludicrously inadequate. The same
may be said of the definition of the purpose of education
which we have already found in The Churches Survey Their
Task. According to this definition, education is the process
by which the community attempts to pass on to all its mem-
bers its culture, including the standards by which it would
have them live. The community, in this definition, is an
unconscious collective mind, very different from the mind
of the Ministry of Education, or the Head Masters’ Associa-
tion, or the mind of any of the numerous bodies concerned
with education. If we include as education all the influences
of family and environment, we are going far beyond what
professional educators can control — ^though their sway can
extend very far indeed; but if we mean that culture is what
is passed on by our elementary and secondary schools, or by
our preparatory and public schools, then we are asserting
that an organ is a whole organism. For the schools can trans-
mit only a part, and they can only transmit this part effec-
tively, if the outside influences, not only of family and
environment, but of work and play, of newsprint and spec-
tacles and entertainment and sport, are in harmony with
them.

Error creeps in again and again through our tendency to
think of culture as group culture exclusively, the culture of
the ‘cultured’ classes and dikes. We then proceed to think
of the humbler part of society as having culture only in so
far as it participates in this superior and more conscious cul-
ture. To treat the ‘uneducated’ mass of the population as
we might treat some innocent tribe of savages to whom we
are impelled to deliver the true faith, is to encourage them
to neglect or despise that culture which they shordd possess
and from which the more conscious part of culture draws
vitality; and to aim to make everyone share in the apprecia-
tion of the fruits of the more conscious part of culture is to

106

Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

adulterate and cheapen what you give. For it is an essential
condition of the preservation of the quality of the culture of
the minority, that it should continue to be a minority culture.
No number of Young Peoples’ Colleges will compensate for
the deterioration of Oxford and Cambridge, and for the dis-
appearance of that ‘blend’ which Dr. Joad relishes. A ‘mass-
culture’ will always be a substitute-culture 5 and sooner or
later the deception will become apparent to the more intelli-
gent of those upon whom this culture has been palmed off.

I ana not questioning the usefulness, or deriding the dig-
nity of Young Peoples’ Colleges, or of any other particular
new construction. In so far as these institutions can he good,
they are more likely to be good, and not to deliver dis-
appointment, if we are frankly aware of the limits of what
we can do with tliern, and if we combat the delusion that
the maladies of the modern world can be put right by a sys-
tem of instruction. A measure which is desirable as a pallia-
tive, may be injurious if presented as a cure. My main point
is the same as that which I tried to make in the previous
chapter, when I spoke of the tendency of politics to domi-
nate culture, instead of keeping to its place within a culture.
There is also the danger that education — ^which indeed
comes under the influence of politics — ^will take upon itself
the i-eformation and direction of culture, instead of keeping
to its place as one of the activities through which a culture
realises itself. Culture cannot altogether be brought to con-
sciousne.ss j and tlie culture of which we are wholly conscious
is never tlie whole of culture: the effective crdture is that
which is directing the activities of those who are manipula-
ting that which tliey call culture.

So t he inslrucLivo point is this, that the more education
arrogates to itself the responsibility, the more systematically
will it betray culture. Tlie definition of the purpose of educa-
tion in The Churches Survey Their Task returns to plague
us like the laughter of hyaenas at a funeral. WTiere that
culture is regarded as jfmal, the attempt is made to impose it
on younger minds. Where it is viewed as a stage in develop-
ment, younger minds are trained to receive it and to improve

Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

upon It. These are cosseting phrases which reprove our cul-
tural ancestors including those of (rreece^ I\.oinej Italy and
France — who had no notion of the extent to which their
culture was going to he improved upon after the Oxford
Conference on Church, Community and State in 1957. We
know now that the highest achievements of the past, in art,
in wisdom, in holiness, were but ‘stages in development’
which we can teach our springalds to improve upon. We
must not train them merely to receive the culture of the
past, for that would be to regard the culture of the past as
final. We must not impose culture upon the young, though
we may impose upon them whatever political and social
philosophy is in vogue. And yet the culture of Europe has
deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by
no means the oldest among us. And we know, that whether
education can foster and improve culture or not, it can
surely adulterate and degrade it. For there is no doubt that
in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering
our standards, and more and more abandoning the study of
those subjects by which the essentials of our culture — of that
part of it which is transmissible by education — are trans-
mitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the
ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will
encamp in their mechanised caravans.

The previous paragraph is to be considered only as an
incidental flourish to relieve the feelings of the writer and
perhaps of a few of his more sympathetic readers. It is no
longer possible, as it might have been a hundred years ago,
to find consolation in prophetic gloom; and such a means of
escape would betray the intentions of this essay as stated in
my introduction. If the reader goes so far as to agree that the
kind of organisation of society which I have indicated is
likely to be that most favourable to the grovyth and smrvival
of a superior culture, he should then consider whether the
means are themselves desirable as ends-, for I have maintained
that we cannot directly set about to create or improve
culture — vre can only will the means which are favourable
to culture, and to do this we must be convinced that these

108

Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion

means are themselves socially desirable. And beyond that
point, we must proceed to consider how far these con-
ditions of culture are possible, or even, in a particular
situation at a particular time, compatible with all the im-
mediate and pressing needs of an emergency. For one thing
to avoid is a universalised planning; one thing to ascertain
is the limits of the plannable. My enquiry, therefore, has
been directed on the meaning of the word culture-, so that
everyone should at least pause to examine what this word
means to him, and what it means to him in each par-
ticular context before using it. Even this modest aspiration
might, if realised, have consequences in the policy and
conduct of our ‘cultural’ enterprises.

109

APPENDIX

The Unity of European Culture

I

This is the first time that I have ever addressed a
German-speaking audience, and before speaking on
such a large subject, I think that I should present my
credentials. For the unity of European culture is a very large
subject indeed, and no one should try to speak about it,
unless he has some particular knowledge or experience. Then
he should start from that knowledge and experience and
show what bearing it has on the general subject. I am a poet
and a critic of poetry^ I was also, from 1922 to 1959, the
editor of a quarterly review. In this first talk I shall try to
show what the first of these two professions has to do with
my subject, and what conclusions my experience has led me
to draw. So this is a series of talks about the unity of Euro-
pean culture from the point of view of a man of letters.

It has often been claimed that English, of all the languages
of modern Europe, is the richest for the purposes of writing
poetry. I think that this claim is justified. But please notice
that when I say ^richest for the purposes of writing poetry’
I have been careful in my words: I do not mean that Eng-
land has produced the greatest poets, or the greatest amount
of great poetry. That is another question altogether. There
are as great poets in other languages: Dante is certainly
greater than Milton, and at least as great as Shakespeare.
And even for the quantity of great poetry, I am not con-
cerned to maintain that England has produced' more. I
simply say that the English language is the most remarkable
medium for the poet to play with. It has the largest vocabu-

110

Appendix

lary: so large, that the command of it by any one poet seems
meagre in comparison with its total wealth. But this is not
the reason why it is the richest language for poetry: it is
only a consequence of the real reason. This reason, in my
opinion, is the variety of the elements of which English is
made up. First, of course, there is the Germanic foundation,
the element that you and we have in common. After this
we find a considerable Scandinavian element, due in the
first place to the Danish conquest. Then there is the Norman
French element, after the Norman conquest. After this there
followed a succession of French influences, traceable through
words adopted at different periods. The sixteenth century
saw a great increase of new words coined from the Latin;
and the development of the language from the early six-
teenth centmry to the middle of the seventeenth, was largely
a process of testing new Latin words, assimilating some and
rejecting others. And there is another element in English,
not so easy to trace, but I think of considerable importance,
the Celtic. But I am not thinking, in all this history, only of
the Words, I am thinking, for poetry, primarily of the
Rhythms. Each of these languages brought its own music:
and the richness of the English language for poetry is first of
all in its variety of metrical elements. There is the rhythm
of early Saxon verse, the rhythm of the Norman French, the
rhythm of the Welsh, and also the influence of generations
of study of Latin and Greek poetry. And even to-day, the
English language enjoys constant possibilities of refreshment
from its several centres: apart from the vocabulary, poems
by Englishmen, Welshmen, Scots and Irishmen, all written
in English, continue to show differences in their Music.

I have not taken the trouble to talk to you in order to
praise my own language; my reason for discussing it is that
I think the reason why English is such a good language for
poetry is that it is a composite from so many different Euro-
pean sources. As I have said, this does not imply that Eng-
land must have produced the greatest poets. Art, as Goethe
said, is in limitation: and a great poet is one who makes the
most of the language that is given him. The truly great poet

111

Appendix

makes his language a great language. It is true, however,
that we tend to think of each of the greater peoples as excel-
ling in one art rather than another: Italy and then France
in painting, Germany in music, and England in poetry. But,
in the first place, no art has ever been the exclusive posses-
sion of any one country of Europe. And in the second place,
there have been periods in which some other country than
England has taken the lead in poetry. For instance, in the
final years of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of
the nineteenth, the Romantic movement in English poetry
certainly dominated. But in the second half of the nine-
teenth century the greatest contribution to European poetry
was certainly made in France. I refer to the tradition which
starts with Baudelaire, and culminates in Paul Valery. I ven-
tiore to say that without this French tradition the work of
three poets in other lemguages — and three very different
from each other — I refer to W. B. Yeats, to Rainer Maria
Rilke, and, if I may, to myself — ^would hardly be conceiv-
able. And, so complicated are these literary influences, we
must remember that this French movement itself owed a
good deal to an American of Irish extraction: Edgar Allan
Poe. And, even when one country and language leads all
others, we must not assume that the poets to whom this is
due are necessarily the greatest poets. I have spoken of the
Romantic movement in England. But at that time Goethe was
writing. I do not know of any standard by which one could
gauge the relative greatness of Goethe and Wordsworth as
poets, but the total work of Goethe has a scope which makes
him a greater man. And no English poet contemporary with
Wordsworth can enter into comparison with Goethe at all.

I have been leading up to another important truth about
poetry in Europe. This is, that no one nation, no one lan-
guage, would have achieved what it has, if the same art had
not been cultivated in neighbouring coxmtries and in differ-
ent languages. We cannot imderstand any one European
literature without knowing a good deal about the others.
When we examine the history of poetry in Europe, we find
a tissue of influences woven to and fro. There have been

112

Appendix

good poets who knew no language hut their own, but
even they have been subject to influences taken in and dis-
seminated by other writers among their own people. Now,
the possibility of each literature renewing itself, proceeding
to new creative activity, making new discoveries in the use
of words, depends on two things. First, its ability to receive
and assimilate influences from abroad. Second, its ability to
go back and learn from its own sources. As for the first, when
the several countries of Europe are cut off from each other,
when poets no longer read any literature but that in their
own language, poetry in every country must deteriorate. As
for the second, I wish to make this point especially: that
every literature must have some sources which are pecu-
liarly its own, deep in its own history^ but, also, and at least
equally important, are the sources which we share in com-
mon; tliat is, the literature of Rome, of Greece and of Israel.

Tliere is a question which ought to be asked at this point,
and wliich ought to be answered. What of the influences
from outside Europe, of the great literature of Asia?

In the literature of Asia is great poetry. There is also pro-
found wisdom and some very difficult metaphysics; but at
the moment I am only concerned with poetry. I have no
knowledge whatever of the Arabic, Persian, or Chinese lan-
guages. Long ago I studied the ancient Indian languages,
and while I was chiefly interested at that time in Philosophy,
I read a little poetry too; and I know that my own poetry
shows the influence of Indian thought and sensibility. But
generally, poets are not oriental scholars — I was never a
scholar myself; and the influence of oriental literature upon
poets is usually through translations. That there has been
som(^ influence of poetry of the East in the last century and
a half is undeniable: to instance only English poetry, and in
our own lime, the poetical translations from the Chinese
made by Ezra Pound, and those made by Arthur Waley,
have probably been read by every poet writing in English.
It is obviou-s that through individual interpreters, specially
giftetl for appreciating a remote culture, every literature
may influence every other; and I emphasise this. For when

„ 113 E.D.C.

Appendix

I speak of the unity of European culture, I do not want
to give the impression that I regard Emopean culture as
something cut off from every other. The frontiers of culture
are not, and should not he, closed. But history makes a
difference. Those countries which share the most history,
are the most important to each other, with respect to
their future literature. We have our common classics, of
Greece and Rome; we have a common classic even in our
several translations of the Bible.

What I have said of poetry is I think true of the other arts
as well. The painter or the composer perhaps enjoys greater
freedom, in that he is not limited by a particrdar language
spoken only in one part of Europe: but in the practice of
every art I think you find the same three elements: the
local tradition, the common European tradition, and the
influence of the art of one European country upon another.
I only put this as a suggestion. I must limit myself to the art
which I know most about. In poetry at least, no one country
can be consistently highly creative for an indefinite period.
Each country must have its secondary epochs, when no
remarkable new development takes place: and so the centre
of activity will shift to and fro between one country and
another. And in poetry there is no such thing as complete
originality, owing nothing to the past. Whenever a Virgil, a
Dante, a Shakespeare, a Goethe is born, the whole future of
European poetry is altered. When a great poet has lived,
certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be
achieved again; but, on the other hand, every great poet
adds something to the complex material out of which future
poetry will be written.

I have been speaking of the unity of Emopean culture as
illustrated by the arts and among the arts by the only one on
which I am quahfied to speak. I want to talk next time about
the unity of European culture as illustrated by ideas. I men-
tioned at the beginning that during the period between the
wars I had edited a quarterly review. My experience in this
capacity, and my reflections upon it, will provide the starting
point for my next talk.

114

Appendix

II

I mentioned in my last talk that I had started and
edited, between the wars, a literary review. I mentioned
it first as one of my qualifications for speaking on this
general subject. But also the history of this review illustrates
some of the points that I want to make. So I hope that, after
I have told you a little about it, you will begin to see its
relevance to the subject of these talks.

We produced the first number of this review in the
autumn of 1922, and decided to bring it to an end with the
first number of the year 1 959. So you see that its life covered
nearly tlu^ same period that we call the years of peace.
Except for a period of six months during which I tried the
experiuH'iiL of ])r()ducing it monthly, its appearance was four
times a yiau-. In starting this review, I had the aim of bring-
ing together the best in new thinldng and new writing in its
time, from all the countries of Europe that had anything to
contribute to the common good. Of course it was designed
primarily for English readers, and therefore all foreign con-
tributions had to appear in an English translation. There
itiay be a function for reviews published in two or more lan-
guages, and in two or more countries simultaneously. But
oven sucli reviews, searching all Europe for contributions,
must contain some pieces of translation, if they are to be
read by everybody. And they cannot take the place of
thos(^ pcu'iodicals which appear in each country and which
are iuKmded primarily for the readers in that country. So
my review was an ordinary English periodical, only of inter-
national s(X)p(u I sought, therefore, first to find out who were
the host writers, unknown or little known outside of their
own <;ount ly, whose work deserved to be known more widely.
Second, I tried to establish relations with those literary
periodic.als abroad, the aims of which corresponded most
ntfarly to my own. I mention, as instances, the Nouvelle
R(wu(> b'ran^'aise (then edited by Jacques Rivibre, and sub-
soquonlly by Joan Paulhan), the Neue Rundschau, the Neue
Schweizor Rundschau, the Revista de Occidente in Spain, II

115

Appendix

Convegno and others in Italy. These connexions developed
very satisfactorily, and it was no fault of any of the editors
concerned, if they subsequently languished. I am still of the
opinion, twenty-three years after I began, and seven years
after I ended, that the existence of such a network of in-
dependent reviews, at least one in every capital of Europe,
is necessary for the transmission of ideas — and to make pos-
sible the circulation of ideas while they are still fresh. The
editors of such reviews, and if possible the more regular
contributors, should be able to get to know each other person-
ally, to visit each other, to entertain each other, and to ex-
change ideas in conversation. In any one such periodical, of
course, there must be much that will be of interest only to
readers of its own nation and language. But their co-opera-
tion should continually stimulate that circulation of influ-
ence of thought and sensibility, between nation and nation
in Europe, which fertilises and renovates from abroad the
literature of each one of them. And through such co-opera-
tion, and the friendships between men of letters which ensue
from it, should emerge into public view those works of litera-
ture which are not only of local, but of European significance.

The particular point, however, of my talking about my
aims, in relation to a review which has been dead for seven
years, is that in the end they failed. And I attribute this
failure chiefly to the gradual closing of the mental frontiers
of Europe. A kind of cultural autarchy followed inevitably
upon political and economic autarchy. This did not merely
interrupt communications: I believe that it had a numbing
effect upon creative activity within every country. The
blight fell first upon our friends in Italy. And after 1935
contributions from Germany became more and more diffi-
cult to find. Some of our friends diedj some disappeared;
some merely became silent. Some went abroad, cut off from
their own cultural roots. One of the latest found and the last
lost, was that great critic and good European, who died a few
months ago: Theodor Haecker. And, from much of the Ger-
man writing that I saw in the 30’s, by authors previously
unknown to me, I formed the opinion that the newer Ger-

116

Appendix

man writers had less and less to say to Europe^ that they
were more and more saying what could be understood, if
understood at all, only in Germany. What happened in
Spain is more confused; the tumult of the civil war was
hardly favourable to thought and creative writing; and that
war divided and scattered, even when it did not destroy,
many of her ablest writers. In France there was still free
intellectual activity, but more and more harassed and limited
by political anxieties and forebodings, and by the internal
divisions which political prepossessions set up. England,
though manifesting some symptoms of the same malady,
remained apparently intact. But I think that our literature
of that period suffered by being more and more restricted to
its own resources, as well as by the obsession with politics.

Now the first comment I have to make on this story of a
literary review whicli had clearly failed of its purpose several
years b('fore events brought it to an end, is this. A universal
concern with politics does not unite, it divides. It unites
tliose politically minded folk who agree, across the frontiers
of nations, against some other international group who hold
opposed views. But it tends to destroy the cultural unity of
Europe'. Thv. Criterion, for that is the name of the review
which [ (idiled, had, I believe, a definite character and co-
hesion, although its contributors were men holding the most
diverse^ political, social and religious views. I think also that
it had a definite congeniality with the foreign periodicals
with which it associated itself. The question of a writer’s
political, social or religious views simply did not enter into
our calculations, or into those of our foreign colleagues.
What. lh(‘ common basis was, both at home and abroad, is
not easy to define. In those days it was unnecessary to formu-
laKi it; at the present time it becomes impossible to formu-
late. I should say that it was a common concern for the
highest standards both of thought and of expression, that it
was a common curiosity and openness of mind to new ideas.
'I'he ideas with which you did not agree, the opinions which
you could not accept, were as important to you as those
which you found inunodiately acceptable. You examined

117

Appendix

tli6ixL without hostility ^ ftiid with tho ^ssursiico th&t you
could learn from them. In other words, we could take for
granted an interest, a delight, in ideas for their own sake, in
the free play of intellect. And I think that also, among our
chief contributors and colleagues, there was something
which was not so much a consciously held belief, but an un-
conscious assumption. Something which had never been
doubted, and therefore had no need to rise to the conscious
level of affirmation. It was the assumption that there existed
an international fraternity of men of letters, within Europe:
a bond which did not replace, but was perfectly compatible
with, national loyalties, religious loyalties, and differences of
political philosophy. And that it was our business not so much
to make any particular ideas prevail, as to maintain intellec-
tual activity on the highest level.

I do not think that The Criterion^ in its final years, wholly
succeeded in living up to this ideal. I think that in the later
years it tended to reflect a particular point of view, rather
than to illustrate a variety of views on that plane. But I do
not think that this was altogether the fault of the editor: I
think that it came about partly from the pressure of circum-
stances of which I have spoken.

I am not pretending that politics and culture have nothing
to do with each other. If they could be kept completely
apart, the problem might be simpler than it is. A nation’s
political structure affects its culture, and in turn is affected
by that culture. But nowadays we take too much interest in
each other’s domestic politics, and at the same time have
very little contact with each other’s culture. The confusion
of culture and politics may lead in two different directions.
It may make a nation intolerant of every culture but its own,
so that it feels impelled to stamp out, or to remould, every
culture surrounding it. An error of the Germany of Hitler
was to assume that every other culture than that of Ger-
"ny was either decadent or barbaric. Let us have an end of
b. assumptions. The other direction in which the confu-
1 of culture and politics may lead, is towards the ideal of a
dd state in which there will, in the end, be only one uni-

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form world culture. I am not here criticising any schemes
for world organisation. Such schemes belong to the plane of
engineering, of devising machinery. Machinery is necessary,
and the more perfect the machine the better. But culture is
something that must grow^ you cannot build a tree, you can
only plant it, and care for it, and wait for it to mature in its
due time 5 and when it is grown you must not complain if
you find that from an acorn has come an oak, and not an
elm-tree. And a political structure is partly construction,
and partly growth; partly machinery, and the same
machinery, if good, is equally good for all peoples; and partly
growing with and from the nation’s culture, and in that
respect different from that of other nations. For the health
of the culture of Europe two conditions are required; that
the culture of each country should be unique, and that the
different cultures should recognise their relationship to each
other, so that each should be susceptible of influence from
the others. And this is possible because there is a common
element in European culture, an interrelated history of
thought and feeling and behaviour, an interchange of arts
and of ideas.

In my last talk I shall try to define this common element
more closely: and I think that will require my saying a little
more about the meaning that I give to this word ‘Culture’,
which I have been using so constantly.

Ill

I said at the end of my second talk that I should want to
make a lit.llf> clearer what I mean when I use the term
cultur(!. Take ‘domcxjracy’, this is a term which needs to
bo, not only defined, but illustrated, almost every time we
use it. And it is necessary to be clear about what we mean by
‘culture’, so that wo may be clear about the distinction be-
tween the material organisation of Europe, and the spiritual
organism of Europe. If the latter dies, then what you orga-
nise will not be Europe, but merely a mass of human beings
speaking several different languages. And there will be no

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longer any justification for their continuing to speak differ-
ent languages, for they will no longer have anything to say
which cannot be said equally well in any language: they
will, in short, have no longer anything to say in poetry. I
have already affirmed that there can be no ‘European’ cul-
ture if the several countries are isolated from each other; I
add now that there can be no European culture if these
countries are reduced to identity. We need variety in unity:
not the unity of organisation, but the unity of nature.

By ‘culture’, then, I mean first of all what the anthropo-
logists mean: the way of life of a particular people living
together in one place. That culture is made visible in their
arts, in their social system, in their habits and customs, in
their religion. But these things added together do not consti-
tute the culture, though we often speak for convenience as
if they did. These things are simply the parts into which a
culture can be anatomised, as a human body can. But just as
a man is something more than an assemblage of the various
constituent parts of his body, so a culture is more than the
assemblage of its arts, customs, and religious beliefs. These
things all act upon each other, and fully to xmderstand one
you have to understand all. Now there are of course higher
cultures and lower cultures, and the higher cultures in
general are distinguished by differentiation of function, so
that you can speak of the less cultured and the more cultured
strata of society, and finally, you can speak of individuals as
being exceptionally cultured. The ciilture of an artist or a
philosopher is distinct from that of a mine worker or field
labourerj the culture of a poet will be somewhat different
from that of a politician 5 but in a healthy society these are
all parts of the same culture; and the artist, the poet, the
philosopher, the politician and the labourer will have a cul-
ture in common, which they do not share with other people
of the same occupations in other countries.

Now it is obvious that one unity of culture is that of the
people who live together and speak the same language: be-
cause speaking the same language means thinking, and feel-
ing, and having emotions, rather differently from people'

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who use a different language. But the cultures of different
peoples do affect each other: in the world of the future it
looks as if every part of the world would affect every other
part. I have suggested earlier, that the cultures of the differ-
ent countries of Europe have in the past derived very great
benefit from their influence upon each other. I have sug-
gested that the national culture which isolates itself volun-
tarily, or the national culture which is cut off from others by
circumstances which it cannot conti'ol, suffers from this isola-
tion. Also, that the country which receives culture from
abroad, without having anything to give in return, and the
country which aims to impose its culture on another, with-
out accepting anything in return, will both suffer from this
lack of reciprocity.

There is something more than a general exchange of cul-
ture influences, however. You cannot even attempt to trade
equally with every other nation: there will be some who
need the kind of goods that you produce, more than others
do, and there will be some who produce the goods you need
yourselves, and others who do not. So cultures of people
speaking different languages can be more or less closely
related: and sometimes so closely related that we can speak
of their having a common culture. Now when we speak of
‘European culture’, we mean the identities which we can
discover in the various national cultures; and of course even
within Europe, some cultures are more closely related than
others. Also, one culture within a group of cultures can be
closely related, on different sides, to two cultures which are
not closely related to each other. Your cousins are not all
cousins of each other, for some are on the father’s side and
some on the mother’s. Now, just as I have refused to consider
the culture of Europe simply as the sum of a number of
unrelated cultures in the same area, so I refused to separate
the world into quite unrelated cultural groups; I refused to
draw any absolute line between East and West, between
Europe and Asia. There are, however, certain common
features in Europe, which make it possible to speak of a
European culture. What are they?

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The dominant force in creating a common culture be-
tween peoples each of which has its distinct cultme, is reli-
gion. Please do not, at this point, make a mistake in antici-
pating my meaning. This is not a religious talk, and I am
not setting out to convert anybody. I am simply stating a
fact. I am not so much concerned with the communion of
Christian believers to-day; I am talking about the common
tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is,
and about the common cultural elements which this com-
mon Christianity has brought with it. If Asia were converted
to Christianity to-morrow, it would not thereby become a
part of Europe. It is in Christianity that our arts have
developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have
— ^until recently — ^been rooted. It is against a background of
Christianity that all our thought has significance. An indivi-
dual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is
true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all
spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend
upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture
could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not
believe that the culture of Europe could survive the com-
plete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am con-
vinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself,
but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the
whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully
again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made.
You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to
give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You
must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should
not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-
great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be
happy in it.

To our Christian heritage we owe many things beside
religious faith. Through it we trace the evolution of our arts,
through it we have our conception of Roman Law which
has done so much to shape the Western World, through it
we have oior conceptions of private and public morality. And
through it we have otu- common standards of literature, in

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Appendix

the literatures of Greece and Rome. The Western world has
its unity in this heritage, in Christianity and in the ancient
civilisations of Greece, Rome and Israel, from which, owing
to two thousand years of Christianity, we trace our descent.
I shall not elaborate this point. What I wish to say is, that
this unity in the common elements of culture, throughout
many centuries, is the true bond between us. No political
and econo niic organisation, however much goodwill it com-
mands, can supply what this culture unity gives. If we dissi-
pate or throw away our common patrimony of culture, then
all the organisation and planning of the most ingenious
minds will not help us, or bring us closer together.

Tlie unity of culture, in contrast to the unity of political
organisation, does not require us all to have only one loyalty:
it means that tlxere will be a variety of loyalties. It is wrong
that tiie only duty of the individual should be held to be
towards tin* State; it is fantastic to hold that the supreme
duty of every individual should be towards a Super-State. I
will give one instance of what I mean by a variety of loyalties.
No university ought to be merely a national institution, even
if it is suppoi'ted by the nation. The universities of Europe
should have their common ideals, they should have their
obligations towards each other. They should be independent
of the g'ov(u"nments of the countries in which they are situ-
ated. 'Ihey should not be institutions for the training of an
efficient bureaucracy, or for equipping scientists to get the
bettor of foreign scientists; they should stand for the pre-
servation of learning, for the pursuit of truth, and in so far
as men are capable of it, the attainment of wisdom.

There is nxuch more that I should have liked to say in this
last talk, hut I must now be very brief. My last appeal is to
the men of letters of Europe, who have a special responsi-
bility for the preservation and transmission of our common
cullurc*. We ixxay hold very different political views: our
common responsibility is to preserve our common culture
unconlaminatod by political influences. It is not a question
of sentiment: it does not matter so much whether we like
each other, or praise each other’s writings. What matters is

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that we should recognise our relationship and mutual depen-
dence upon each other. What matters is our inability, with-
out each other, to produce those excellent works which mark
a superior civilisation. We cannot, at present, hold much
communication with each other. We cannot visit each
other as private individuals^ if we travel at all, it can only
be through government agencies and with official duties.
But we can at least try to save something of those goods of
which we are the common trustees ^ the legacy of Greece,
Rome and Israel, and the legacy of Europe throughout the
last 2,000 years. In a world which has seen such material
devastation as ours, these spiritual possessions are also in
imminent peril.

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